Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

The wide variety of protest actions at the Pentagon March exemplifies the idea ofdo-your-own-thing. In addition to the speakers, leaders, and exorcists, some participantschose to work as March marshals, using loudspeakers to encourage the crowd toward thePentagon along the permitted route. Many others participated without carrying a sign orthrowing objects at the guards. With different ways to participate in the Pentagon March,it was up to each demonstrator to choose what way best suited them. While Mobebrought them together to march against the war, the sit-in and exorcism also providedopportunities for different kinds of political action, civil disobedience, and publicperformance.Even though it came to be widely used by political demonstrators at the PentagonMarch and at Yippie performances in Chicago in the summer of 1968, the philosophy ofdo-your-own-thing came out of the hippie counterculture, characterized by its rejection ofboth mainstream society and political activism. A Time Magazine research project on thehippies argued that the hippies had “no desire to control the machinery of society orredirect it toward new goals” (Brown 13). A young hippie interviewed by sociologistLewis Yablonsky explained that the hippies regarded the dominant culture in the UnitedStates as:just a large machine and you don’t know who runs the machine or what.It’s just there. It is just cutting out more people from the same machine.Even the cream of society, they become machines, you know. The way Ilook at it is that they treat human beings as puppets. They are not on theirown. (106)80