Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
R.I.P. "Hippie John" Mahoney
An old friend recently passed away. Read his obituary here.
I first met John in 1988 at an anarchist seminar at VCU that some of us then-Wobblies had put together. One Sunday afternoon a short time later, John gave another anarchist and I a lift to an IWW gathering in Baltimore. I would frequently encounter John around Richmond over the next couple of decades and usually have an interesting political discussion with him whenever I ran into him.
John was an ex-Yippie who had gotten into radical politics during the Vietnam War era. I'm not sure how old he was when he passed, but my guess is that he was in his late 50s. John had been arrested during civil disobedience in protest of the U.S. war in Central America during the 1980s, and was involved in a local trial dubbed the case of the "Richmond Eleven."
I had my differences with John. Over the years, I started moving in political directions he didn't particularly approve of, and I could never get behind his visceral hostility to the symbols of Confederate heritage that decorate Richmond. History is history, and its remembrance neither deifies or demonizes its content.
John was a good guy. I greatly respected him, and I will miss his presence in Richmond.
I first met John in 1988 at an anarchist seminar at VCU that some of us then-Wobblies had put together. One Sunday afternoon a short time later, John gave another anarchist and I a lift to an IWW gathering in Baltimore. I would frequently encounter John around Richmond over the next couple of decades and usually have an interesting political discussion with him whenever I ran into him.
John was an ex-Yippie who had gotten into radical politics during the Vietnam War era. I'm not sure how old he was when he passed, but my guess is that he was in his late 50s. John had been arrested during civil disobedience in protest of the U.S. war in Central America during the 1980s, and was involved in a local trial dubbed the case of the "Richmond Eleven."
I had my differences with John. Over the years, I started moving in political directions he didn't particularly approve of, and I could never get behind his visceral hostility to the symbols of Confederate heritage that decorate Richmond. History is history, and its remembrance neither deifies or demonizes its content.
John was a good guy. I greatly respected him, and I will miss his presence in Richmond.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
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