mattgerlach's Journal

Question 4
The Weathermen were originally attacking people with no other message than to demonstrate what was going on in Vietnam. Bringing the war home as they called it. They attacked the rich and aimed to bomb an officer’s ball. It was not until after the bomb designed to kill the people at the officer’s ball prematurely exploded killing several Weathermen that they maybe saw the cost of lives was too high of a punishment for the American people.
I don’t think it makes them more sympathetic. I see it as a sign of the group maturing their ideology. They stopped bombing at random and focused on targets that had recently committed violent acts against groups they sympathized with. To me it is still violence but they are trying to create a channel to express their view to the masses. It did allow the majority of people in America to hear about events that the mainstream media my have only mentioned in passing or from the skewed view of the government. To me the Weathermen were a group that just got so frustrated with the lack of affect nonviolent protesting was getting so the next logical step is violence.