The radicals, exemplified by the self-styled cheerleaders of the movement Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, disdained the hippies for their abdication from ‘serious’ political work. The hippies just wanted everybody to love everybody else and thought the radicals were just the same old control-freaks in new costumes.
(…)
Ginsberg pointed out to Leary that while he might have dropped out of his job as a psychology teacher at Harvard, he had multiple safety nets that would never be available to the vast majority of teenagers who were taking acid and trying to figure out how to function in the world while ‘staying true to their new selves’.
‘What,’ Ginsberg asked, ‘can I drop out of?’
‘Your teaching at Cal,’ Leary snapped back.
Ginsberg chuckled. ‘But I need the money.’
