Introduction
D epending on when you start counting from, its been more than fifty years since I joined with others of my generation in the work of repairing the world. Most of those years were spent trying to make things better for people who were being hurt by the cruelties of economic, racial, and sexual oppression; by a brutal and unnecessary war; and by a politics beholden to wealth that ignored or actively plotted against social justice. Two of those years1968 and 1969propelled me, along with seven other men, to the forefront of Americas culture wars and changed my life forever.
Because of my experiences in the 1960s, I have an admittedly odd relationship to politics these days. Back then everyone was brave. We were all certain that we were building a better, freer, more equitable America. Social justice wasnt an abstract principle in some political philosophy course; it was something to fight for in the streets. There was a war that had to be stopped. And for some of us, including me, long hair, beads, arrests, and jail time were all proofs of our political commitment. We frightened our parents terribly.
Today I engage in politics like some demented, obsessed observer. Im forever watching, worrying, calculating, and analyzing, but Im kept away from most direct political work by a barrier made up of memories of what was and what might have been. My impulses to act politically are usually (but thank the goddess, not always) thwarted by the enduring cynicism and wariness of a political refugee who now lives in a familiar but strange land.
After unexpectedly surviving a modest, but still real enough, civil war, I have never been able to completely reconcile my leftover feelings, my long-held values, and my ideals with my everyday life in America. I often feel oddly displaced. (And all those radio stations playing hits from the sixties and seventies, and the aging rockers who are still touring, dont help.) Despite my best efforts to stay connected to what is really happening, I am easily caught unawares coming out of an engaging evening movie, startled to remember where I am and who I am now. The pastits noise, energy, hope, anger, and riskis always lurking in my head, often more present than whatever it is Im supposed to be seeing and doing and feeling in the here and now.
But Im not a fool. I understand that in many other places, at other times, and even now, I would at best still be imprisoned for my confrontations with state power. Those confrontations started small: shouting through a megaphone about freedom of speech to a crowd on a college campus; joining picket lines in support of the sit-ins against segregation in southern cities. But they grew into years of organizing workwhich included demonstrations and arrestswith people in poor communities to help them fight back against the local governments deliberate lies, denigration, and neglect. Those confrontations grew into much larger demonstrations against an unjust war and the abuse of power by the state and the rich, demonstrations that demanded changes to a demeaning, ugly, oppressive culture. That led to violence in the streets, more arrests, and eventually to a famous, raucous political trial involving some my friends, where the federal governments failure to silence or jail us for very long still shows that people do in fact have the capacity and the responsibility to speak out and fight back against cruel and unjust power. My life since those faraway days has instead been fairly successful. Ive integrated with the real world well enough to have mostly earned my living by doing work for politicians and nonprofit organizations that I can defend to myself as acceptable.
Most of the people I knew back then might not agree with my notions of politically acceptable work. So many of us were certain that we knew the definitions and boundaries of what good, or important, or useful work were, the exact ways one had to see and talk about the world in order to move the revolution, or at least positive political change, forward. And, as it seems for a lot of people now, we werent shy about making serious moral judgments about the things our friends might be doing or saying that didnt match our expectations.
Still, even the best work I did for many years could only be described as ameliorativesimply trying to make things a little better for some people in some places in an immediate way. My oldest son once marveled that I somehow had been able to mostly make a living and lead a life that continued to revolve around my self-chosen identity as political. He wondered aloud how I had managed it, but at the time I didnt have much of an acceptable sounding answer for him. First, I didnt really think I had managed to have anything close to the sort of politically charged and directed life that he thought I had lived. If I compared my life to how many other people lived, though, I was more often engaged in politics. I had been driven, tortured, gladdened, and brought to joy or rage by politics. Id sometimes made fateful decisions about how I would lead my life based on whatever my understanding of politics and possibility were in a particular moment. But I was also held back from giving as honest an answer as my son deserved because I wasand am still nowvulnerable to the guilt and loss that was all too often involved in it all. And in Chicago in the late sixties, my son was one of the victims of my breaking so many promises Id made or impliedmost specifically to his mother and to himbefore I was willingly swept away into a different life.
So I sort of gave him half an answer involving luck. Because of course in those days, if you were going to survive a dissident political life, and then be able to make up for at least part of the hurt your earlier choices had caused to the people you loved, you had to be lucky.
It also helped that the times and stars have been well-aligned for me. I didnt end up dead, and I didnt end up in a prison cell for too long. The world was rich and forgetful enough to make it possible for me to just slip back into it. Though Im not oblivious to the fact that over the years, I was able to escape the most terrible consequences of my work against state power in part because Im a white, heterosexual, cisgender man with all sorts of privileges and educational credentials, raised in relative comfort, and who has mostly been able to live and work in social contexts where my Jewish identity wasnt an obvious handicap. So I was basically able to walk away from direct political work when I wanted to. Nobody much noticed or cared. And I simply continued on with my day-to-day life.
