SDS Resurfaces, This Time for a New Generation : Politics: Huntington Beach student starts chapter of 1960s protest group to focus on freedom of expression. But don’t call members hippies or flower children, despite the liberal bent.

“We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” --Excerpt from the Port Huron Statement, issued by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962.

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John Hobbs wasn’t even born when the Students for a Democratic Society issued their Angst- ridden radical manifesto in the 1960s. A child of the Reagan era, Hobbs is a freshman at Huntington Beach High School.

But within the comfortable, conservative cradle of Orange County, 15-year-old Hobbs has started his own Students for a Democratic Society chapter because he doesn’t like what he sees when he looks toward the future.

Hobbs and his partner, 14-year-old Mindy Nettifee, run weekly lunchtime meetings for teen-agers with a liberal bent. On good days, their group is 20 to 30 members strong, they say.

“I knew that even in Orange County I wouldn’t be the only one who wanted a group like this,” said Hobbs, poised on a chair at a smoky Huntington Beach coffeehouse on a recent afternoon.

SDS dates back to the decade of “Make Love, Not War” and Flower Power; it comes from a dissident student group founded in the early 1960s by Tom Hayden and fellow students at the University of Michigan.

Hobbs read about the group--which splintered and faded--in a book on 1960s radical politics and was inspired to start his own new New Left, he says.

“I found out that that group supported civil rights and liberal thought, so why not?” Hobbs said.

The group has run into some roadblocks, though. School administrators haven’t recognized it as an official club.

Huntington Beach Union High School District’s equal-access policy allows religious and other student groups to meet before and after school and during lunch in classrooms. The groups, including SDS, are not recognized as official school clubs because they are not related to school curriculum.

Only official clubs may invite speakers to campus. When Hobbs and Co. wanted to invite current California gubernatorial candidate Hayden to speak, their hands were tied, they say, and they had to drop the idea.

Hayden has not had contact with the group, but said he is honored that students would appropriate the name.

“Every generation invents its forms of protest anew,” Hayden said, “and I hope they’re focusing on their future.”

He added that young people live in a different time now--students 18 and older can vote, and the economy is worse, making issues of educational affordability much more important.

“I think there’s a youth movement now that’s outside of politics,” Hayden says. “It’s mainly in culture, music and lifestyle . . . politics doesn’t provide enough meaning” for most.

SDS members say their focus of protest is dress codes--something Hayden protested when he was younger--and they recently appeared on a UC Irvine-based alternative radio show to discuss them.

They turn thumbs down on a bill working its way through the state Legislature that would let public schools impose dress codes requiring uniforms. They particularly scorn new additions to their own school district’s dress code.

“Clothing for high school students is a form of expression,” said Nettifee, wearing jeans and black, clunky Mary Janes. “For some, the only way they can express themselves is that way. It’s hard enough for teen-agers to express themselves anyway.”

Their school district’s code bars clothes with a sexual tone, including tank tops and shirts with obscene or offensive slogans. Adopted in April, the code also bars clothes with spikes or chains, as well as belt buckles with “gang symbols.” Tattoos are also a no-no, although a committee at each school in the district can interpret which parts of the code to enforce.

Hobbs and his friends began passing out flyers on campus with the text of the code before it was passed, reading: “If this makes you angry, come to an SDS meeting.”

He says it didn’t win him friends in the school administration. They stopped members from distributing them.

“They were handing out a flyer that contained language that I think potentially could’ve upset a lot of students and people,” Huntington Beach High Principal Jim Staunton said. “I told them much of what they wrote was wrong.”

Staunton said SDS members assumed the dress code was “a blanket thrown over every student in the district. . . . They set out to protest something before they knew all the facts.”

He says he neither approves nor disapproves of the group. “It’s a matter of exercising their rights--they have a right to exist,” Staunton said, before adding that members seem to be “bright kids.”

Freedom of expression is the new SDS’s mantra. Around a table at Midnight Espresso recently, Hobbs and Nettifee discussed protesting what they believe are infringements of their freedom, including strict curfews for youths in Huntington Beach.

The pair say they aren’t looking for confrontation, though.

“I’m a pacifist,” Hobbs declared.

He says he believes in making his point other ways. Because he thinks women should not feel pressured to wear makeup, for example, Hobbs once went to school done up in eye shadow and lipstick.

Despite their liberal line, don’t call Hobbs or Nettifee wanna-be hippies.

“In no way do I want to be a hippie, or a person from the ‘60s,” Hobbs said.

Nettifee chimes in. “My mom was not a hippie, she was not an activist,” she said. “All her friends went to Woodstock and she didn’t even go.”

They say they hope that through their group they can provide a way for young people with similar views in Orange County to discuss democracy and the future of their generation.

“Too many people don’t ask questions or find out things for themselves,” Nettifee said. “I think being a liberal is about being able to search out the truth.”

An SDS Primer HISTORY

Started in early 1960s by radical students at the University of Michigan

Declared the existence of a political “New Left”

Organized to battle urban poverty, segregation and unemployment; encouraged greater citizen participation in government decision-making

Membership reached high of about 100,000 by 1968, a time of growing discontent over Vietnam War

Faded from prominence by early 1970s

Status today: Defunct PRIME MOVERS

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), then a student at Michigan

Hayden classmate Al Haber

Mark Rudd, president of Columbia University chapter HIGHLIGHTS

Port Huron Statement, seminal declaration of 1960s youth movement

Disrupted 1968 Democratic National Convention, leading to trial and acquittal of the “Chicago 7” on charges of inciting a riot

Some extreme members broke off to form the Weathermen, a radical group advocating violence as a means to change

Sources: Times reports; Tom Hayden; “Since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Recent American History” by Robert A. Divine; Researched by ALICIA DI RADO / Los Angeles Times