There was a lot of rebellion at the high school I attended. 4,000 students are a lot harder to control than 400. At one point a group of students organized a walk-out protest that occurred at a certain time in the middle of a class period. When that time came hundreds of students got up and walked out of class and gathered on the school grounds.

What were they protesting? You won’t believe this but they were demanding designated outdoor smoking areas for students! That would be unheard of today. But the protest was actually successful and a few designated smoking areas were created where students were allowed to smoke.

I didn’t even smoke but I joined the protest just because by that time I was a rebel and was ready to protest anything. I was all for student’s rights and rights for anybody even if I didn’t fully understand things. I also joined a couple of protests against the Vietnam War. Every boy in my school lived with a fear of being drafted and sent to our deaths in Vietnam. It was a very palpable fear and the student body was overwhelmingly anti-war and we held several protests and wrote a lot of angry letters to the school newspaper — which actually printed many of them (the journalism teacher actually joined the students in the Vietnam protests).

For me, it was an exhilarating time even if I was a bit of an ignorant fool.