THE GAMES WE PLAY

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library was dedicated on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin during May 1971.

To set the mood for the day, ya'll should recall that ole LBJ, a native born Texan, had significantly escalated the U.S. involvement in the still continuing Vietnam War.

Think back to the news coverage during those years and you will remember the vast population of "hippies" that had developed. In my experience, they were dirty, ragged, long haired, dope smoking, smelly, and generally ignorant. The favorite "causes" of the flower people included the legalization of marijuana and ending involvement in Vietnam ("Make love, not war")

Comes the day of library grand opening and every loud mouth, unemployed, stinkin', uneducated, stoned hippie in the free world showed up to "protest". As per usual, the Texas Highway Patrol was assigned to stand between the problem and the library and keep the peace.

Now this weren't no pick-nick. We put wooden Texas Highway Department saw horses in a long line with "us" on one side of the "fence" and "them" on the other side (and we stood our butts there all damn day long.

The hippies were naturally screaming (stuff they wouldn't have wanted their mama's to hear) obscenities at us, chanting crap, and figgering out how to generally aggravate.

They urinated in condoms and threw them at us. They wiped with toilet paper and allowed the breeze to blow the soiled paper on us. They threw marijuana cigarettes at us with offers to join them....and just generally caused us to daydream about what we might do the next time we stopped a Volkswagen van with flowers and "peace signs" painted all over that was crammed full of dirty, stinking, long haired freaks who reeked from smoking dope for a living.

Along bout the middle of the afternoon I noticed that the crowd rocking back and forth was causing the wooden saw horses to come apart slightly and then back together with the force of hundreds of people. At the same time, one individual had managed to set himself apart from the crowd by being particularly obnoxious in his comment and volume concerning the elite of the DPS, so ole frankie decided to try something.

I told this singular young gentleman that he could no longer place his hands on the wooden barricades. To my satisfaction, he immediately began to run his hands up, down, over, and all around them creaking, rocking, moving barricades. Guess what, while looking at me he failed to notice that his hand fell into the temporary gap between the saw horses. When them puppies slapped back together with the weight of the crowd behind them, the first joints of his fingers promptly fell to the ground.

After a while, the idiot began to scream and freak out as blood squirted everywhere, but his first reaction was just to stare at me with shock and the realization that he had done exactly what I had planned for him to do.

Score: TEXAS HIGHWAY PATROL - 1 hippies: - 0