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The Bandet was living in San Jose, California and he was a rank-and-file volunteer for the Robert Kennedy campaign for the Presidency. Armed with a prospectus preparing him for any questions he might encounter, the bandet hit the precincts. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the bandet lost faith in the political system, like so many in that generation, but he didn't become disillusioned. The bandet knew there would bever be another Bobby Kennedy , and he realized that it was our responsibility as human beings to carry out what Bobby Kennedy died for. Namely, to take on the plight of the people at the lower end of the economic scale, whose rights are consistently being abused and opportunity is being denied them. The bandet quit his job shortly after and went to college. |
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The bandet was going to Jr. college and working in the cafeteria. The woman that ran the cafeteria told all the male employees to cut their hair or they would be fired. Though the bandet didn't have long hair himself he was stung by the injustice of it. This was a college and most of the clientele were under twenty-one and wouldn't find long hair offensive. The bandet wrote a stinging rebuke in the form of a petition, stating all the workers would walk if one student was fired. The petition had such an overwhlming response that the school administration not only reversed its policy but set up a committee to meet once a month and review grievances. The bandet was elected as one of the student representatives. |
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The schoolyear following the nationwide student strike over the Kent State killings, the bandet wrote a twenty-three page thesis, which served as the constitution for an organization he had founded on campus called Student Union for Social Improvement or SUSI. The purpose of the organization was to bring together under one roof the different factions of the student movement of the 1960's that were splintering off and working against each other-mainly the civil rights and women's rights groups, the anti-war groups against the Vietman War, and the environmentalist groups. The organization faltered then failed. |
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The bandet took a creative writing class and one of the assignments was to write a short story. After several failed attempts at rather biographical stories, the bandet finally settled on a story translated to him by a fellow cafeteria worker, a forty year old housewife. She had helped a hippie girl and a long haired boy, after witnessing the long haired boy get beat up in her front yard by another long haired youth who drove away. She gave the two a ride home even though she could see the boy was stoned out of his head on something-probably LSD. The girl thanked her, hugged her, and told her she was a beautiful person. When she got back home the police and a throng of neighbors, who had apparently seen the fight but remained hidden behind dreapes and curtains, were waiting for her. The police officer lectured her in her driveway, and later that night her husband repeated the lecture. |
The bandet lived on campus as a houseboy in the faculty house, an old luxurious four story house renovated for use by the faculty and their friends. It had conference rooms and a swimming pool and every day the cafeteria would send a special unit (the bandet and the housewife in his short story) over to sell hot lunches between twelve and two p.m. The bandet found another old four-story house on campus not being used called the Cusack House after its original owners. The bandet determined the students needed a student house. First he wrote leaflets, printed them up, and passed them out on campus urging the need for a "student house". Then he set up a table in front of the student center with a petition for the students to sign. He had pictures and a map to the Cusack House. A lot of support was generated, but the school officials wouldn't give in. They claimed the house wasn't earthquake proof and they couldn't insure it. So the bandet and a few of his friens devised another strategy. Part of the group broke into the Cusack House and occupied it until morning. The rest of the group hit the campus early armed with leaflets proclaiming the liberation of the Cusack House and asking the student body to join them. They held a rally on campus at 10:30 a.m. where several speakers spoke of the need for a "student house". By 11:00 a.m. twelve hundred students (some say 1500, campus police claimed about 1000) showed up, marched down to the Cusack House and joined the bandet and his compatriots. By nightfall the students had cleaned the house and established a student run coffeehouse on the bottom floor and twenty-three offices covering such student needs as a Women's center, Black caucus, Chicano caucus, Asian caucus, Veterns against the War, child care center, abortion and family planning counselor, draft counselor (though the draft was ending the war had't), suicide prevention center, drug abuse counseling, etc. The next day the house was surronded by the San Jose tactical squad and the bandet and ten others were arrested and branded with the title "the Foothill 11". The Foothill 11 were bailed out within a few hours, and the next morning, along with 1500 students, retook the house. The incident aired on bay area TV. After two weeks of skirmishes and negotiations between students and school officals(including a raucous board of directors meeting attended by a couple of thousand students and parents) a deal was struck. The students didn't get the house, but they did get twenty-three permanent offices established in the student center, and the student council was replaced by a "people's vote", whereby any student in attendane at the council meeting could vote. This latter provision was very important because it gave the student body at large a say in how the student budget ($160 thousand to $180 thousand a year from the sale of student body cards) was to be spent. |
The bandet wrote a long article in the spring for a girl who was publishing a one-issue underground paper called "Serving Time at Foothill" that would come out in the fall. The article was the background for the political happenings on campus during the student strike over the Kent State killings, from student dissidents camping out all night on campus to the firing and trial of an untenured teacher for supporting the strike. The article stirred up a lot of attention on campus and won praise from faculty members. |
The people's vote from the year before was the idea of a brilliant young professor on campus. He had argued that a representative student government was a sham, since the student council didn't represent the interests of the student body. His position was that anyone who shows up and participates at the council meeting should have a vote, and those who don't partcipate forfeit their vote. This was going back to our roots with the Town Hall meeting, he argued. Prior to the people's vote the student budget ($180 thousand) had always been rubber stamped by a hand picked student council (political science majors and cheerleaders, whose only concern was learning parliamentary procedures) who were rewarded with lucrative scholarships. The bandet surveyed the new situation with the advent of the people's vote and realized a newspaper was needed to educate and guide the student body over the coming budget battles. They already had a school paper, so he and some cohorts commandeered a paper, called the Daily Planet, funded by student council for the purpose of a buy-and-sell want ads for students. They transformed it into a format that served their purposes (also meeting the need for student classifieds) and began to inform the student-body, packing the student council meetings. Student council became a battleground. Before one council meeting the bandet had written an article about a budget issue where twenty select athletes and their coaches were being funded to have steak dinners every week at the student body's expense. At the council meeting many students showed up in protest, so did a lot of jocks and their coaches in support of the bill. As the two sides raged in the shoulder-to-shoulder, standing room only council chambers a fist fight broke out and the police had to come and break it up. At another session fifteen students from chorale, the school choir, had their annual world tour (at student's expense) canceled and replaced by a women's newspaper. Other excesses were cut to fund a childcare center. The people's vote had become dangerous. The privileged were now having to fight for their privilege. |
Two years after having moved to Canada the bandet found himself in Edmonton, Alberta and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories researching a story he found intriguing. The story was about Indians and Eskimos in a remote part of Canada, who had been dispossessed and destitute only a few years before, but through a little known revolution they were able to sue for and win Aboriginal Title to millions of acres of (possibly oil rich) wilderness. The Natives had to hammer out a treaty with the federal government (which would take another fifteen years), but in 1975 they were in the process of rehabilitating themselves. A local native group for native rights had taken the Canadian government to court. They had established a newspaper that served the entire region and gave their people a voice and an identity. The Indians were battling alcoholism, illiteracy, and teaching the young their native tongue in the settlements. The oil companies had proposed to build a 1500 mile long pipeline that would run through the Mackenzie River Valley. This was the spark that set off the native movement. |
The bandet had planned on writing a script about the native movement for a documentary film. Then he began to invision a major motion picture for this story starring Marlon Brando. It would be about indigenous peoples, caribou, and oil development. He wrote a treatment and headed down to LA to try and sell it. Nobody was interested. Finally as a last attempt the bandet went to Marlon Brando's house. The actor was in his driveway with his dogs when the bandet drove up. He politely explained to the bandet that he doesn't talk to anyone without recommendations. The bandet shelved the project for a while. |
The bandet had been carrying around in his head a story about a couple of outlaws on the run, who came across a silver mining town (like Virginia City) on their way to California. The bandet decided to write this story as a screenplay and make a small budget movie with it. After gaining the know-how of filmmaking he could then get the Mackenzie movie made. The bandet headed back to LA. He soon found out that no one was interested in westerns anymore. |
The bandet decided to take the screenplay, which he had titled "The Silver Inn", and turn it into a novel and self-puplish it. He rewrote it and got a thousand copies printed. He teamed up with his old partners from the Daily Planet, and they went around selling it in towns in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. They would get an interview on local television or radio, then go door to door selling the books. People bought them like hotcakes after seeing the guys on TV. The trouble was after they sold all the books there was no money left to publish more, because it cost every dime to live while selling them this way. |
With the ushering in of the 80's and the so called Reagan Revolution the bandet felt, more than ever, that he was being sidetracked from his main mission as a writer, the big issues, the problems plauging mankind, poverty, crime and the justice system, war, weapons, and the refugees they create, and the environment. The bandet felt these problems had to be solved and he wanted to contribute. He shelved the other projects he had been working on and spent his time researching and thinking. The research took him on a trail into history, economics, psychology, religion and finally philosophy. The bandet spent most of his time thinking for hours, days, weeks, sitting in one room thinking. Years passed. The bandet had come full circle. He knows and appreciates the fact that people don't have time to worry about the worlds problems, they've got their hands full with their own struggle for happiness. At the same time he believes the only road to happiness is learning to be human. After all, the opposite of human is not animal, it is inhuman. Inhuman is being cruel and destructive, being human, then, is caring and giving. And what are we when we are being neither human nor inhuman (as most of us are, most of the time)? Nothing? Animals? The bandet wanted to write a book, but in the Reagan era they would hang you as an outlaw for writing such thoughts in a book. So the bandet cleverly disguised them in forty seven seemingly innocuous poems which he published in a book called Spirit and Poverty. |
Over the years the bandet has kept up the research on the Mackenzie River Valley, as well as the village of Old Crow, in Northern Yukon. The bandet has written 130 pages of a screenplay about it. |
The bandet's name is Mitch Carter and he lives in South Lake Tahoe, California. |