It was 1969 and a lot of us who were college freshmen that year spent a lot of time listening to the White Album by the Beatles. That one song in two versions kept replaying in my head.

“You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world.”

And boy, did we! In between listening carefully to the draft call-up numbers on the campus radio and writing lengthy term papers that had to be typed on a typewriter, we organized and fantasized our way through co-education, the anti-war movement overseas and the prosecution of the Black Panther Party at home.

Those causes came together on May Day, 1970 when 40,000 protesters descended on our campus in New Haven to protest the Panther trial. The next day the U.S. launched the invasion of Cambodia, and the day after that four students were shot dead at Kent State University. Things were getting real!

Everyone anticipated a bloodbath on Yale’s campus. Paratroopers in jeeps mounted with machine guns patrolled the streets where the windows of every store and business were completely boarded up. Rioting broke out on the New Haven Green. Windows that had been left unboarded were smashed. An enormous amount of tear gas was fired. The New Haven police, frustrated because the university closed its gates to them, resorted to firing over the roofs of the dormitories into the Old Campus, where Alan Ginsberg grimly chanted until overcome by the gas.

But that was it. No one was killed, in large part thanks to the welcome strategy employed by the university’s president, Kingman Brewster. Demonstrators were welcomed to camp out in the quadrangles that stitch together the Yale campus. Wavy Gravy and Hog Farm Commune showed up to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, just as they had at Woodstock two years before. A handshake agreement between the president, the mayor and the chief of police outlined the forums where protest could occur and where it could not, and those guidelines were largely followed.

Looking back, it was not a revolution. Bobby Seale and Panthers eventually were released. Nixon stayed on as president until a burglary that seems almost quaint by today’s standards brought him down. A lot of us went on to pursue careers in teaching, social work, medicine, government, and public service, the types of careers that Elon Musk decries as fraud.

It was in some ways a carefully scripted protest where things would not get out of hand. Real revolutions feature Cossacks riding down women and children in the snow, and the clang of the guillotine.

As we contemplate how to rid ourselves of the MAGA revolution, let us keep that in mind.