This is a nice idea: the radical efforts of the working class–led in this case by San Francisco longshoremen (port workers)–made possible the 1960s Haight Ashbury counterculture. I don’t know that he makes the case adequately in this article. But I like it.

The first thing anyone said to me in San Francisco in 1980 when I got down off a greyhound bus–he was a very large middle-aged blue collar guy and I had long hair, a beard, rucksack and cowboy hat–was “ferkin’ hippie.” It didn’t strike me then that the unions and the counterculture had much love for each other.

But as a leftie writer-carpenter I actually had a little used union card myself at that time, and I have never wavered in arguing that much of the best of our current system was created or made possible by the unions. At their best they stood for brother- and sisterhood as well as for sectional interests, and the ferkin’ hippies just did that in a different way.