It's war.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

54. Stephen Stills wrote For What It's Worth about the Sunset Strip riots of 1966

known as the hippie riots they were about the imposed curfew by the police on young people, especially revolving around a popular Sunset Strip rock club known as Pandora's Box.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/11/sights_and_sounds_of_the_november_1966_sunset_strip_riots.php

"For What It's Worth," the Buffalo Springfield song that is permanently looped, in the popular consciousness, behind footage of American soldiers in Vietnam (or maybe hippies sticking flowers in the barrels of National Guardsmen's guns), isn't really about war. It's about the right to party on the Sunset Strip. Stephen Stills wrote the song in response to the first of the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots, on November 12, 1966 (47 years ago today), and BS, just off a stint as the house band at the Whisky A Go Go, recorded it a few weeks later. In the early sixties, the Strip (and the US, really) was transitioning from the glamorous Rat Pack days into the kid-driven rock and roll era; in 1962, Jimmy O'Neill, who hosted the groundbreaking music show Shindig!, opened the purple and gold Pandora's Box club on a traffic island at Sunset and Crescent Heights, and the teens flocked (it was followed a few years later by the Whisky and then the Roxy). The flocking teens made traffic jams, the square old neighbors complained, and in 1966 LA County (WeHo was not yet incorporated) decided to start enforcing a decades-old 10 pm curfew law for anyone under 18."


For what It's Worth was recorded in 1966 and released in early 1967. The Chicago Democratic Convention incident occurred a year and a half later. But surely Stills was tuned in to the flavor of the times and he probably drew his inspiration from all of the protests of the era, including the war (as the song doesn't specifically reference any particular protest).