their stories were about being teenagers and young adults, the civil rights movement, the death of mlk and jfk, rfk, the vietnam war, kent state and the like. each had a different moment when they looked at the big picture and said, "things are NOT right, and i MUST join [respective movement] in order to try to change things." i will not relate these stories, because these stories are best from the tongues that issued them. however, these stories triggered a reflection of my own history with an impulse to locate where and when i became a free "radical".
i think i located it -this moment of radicalization- in my own history:
it was at the age of three.
my father who trained at west point, and was groomed as an officer to lead his comrades in the art of war, was caught crying with my mother. he was sitting on her lap at the kitchen table. tears were flowing down his face. when i asked why he was crying, he replied, "your mother bit me."
three days later, he was packed off in his handsome uniform with a duffle bag and a brief case, to a land far away, a land called "vietnam".
during that long year, i would see images, horrifying images on the television news, reports from the land where my father, the soldier, was living without my mother and i. i would lay in bed at night, troubling over this war, i knew only that it included destruction, and two sides in opposition. i would puzzle my young brain to figure out a way to put an end to this devastation, for the most selfish of reasons, i wanted my father to be returned whole and alive, and did not want to lose him. i was haunted for the duration of his tour of duty there.
i thought of warrior olympics: two sides could train for athletic mock battle, the winners take all.
i thought of a type of lottery: paper, rock, scissors between the leaders who wanted to engage in such wars. winner takes all.
i know that many theoretical means of engaging in pseudo-warfare were considered by my young mind and dismissed over the long period of my father's absence, until finally, i believed i had found the ultimate solution:
i believed i could build a platform between the warring sides, and wave a white flag, issuing a cease fire and the proclamation that someone would have to shoot me first, before they could proceed.
oh the innocence of babes, i honestly believed this was the only workable solution! who could shoot a child to continue with the barbarous acts of war?
this year of my life, was the year of my radicalization.
i remembered too, that as a young child, my father had emphatically told me if i threw so much as a penny in the trash, i would adversely affect the value of money at large. somehow what was minted and pressed as money was inherently bound to the value of ALL of it remaining in circulation.
i'm not quite certain why my father related this story to me. i remember clearly that i believed he had given me the key to live in a world where money was no longer in circulation.
whatever his purpose, i feel certain it had the opposite effect of his intentions.
after being handed this information, i purposely threw away pennies at first, then nickels, then dimes, and quarters ... waiting to see some effect crop up due to my transgressions. i was disappointed and frustrated by the whole experiment, as i never felt any discernible shift in money's operations.
my mind has always been preoccupied with socio-political and economic issues... i don't know if we are born with spirits that are inclined toward certain mindsets, or if our circumstances in life create the mindset. was it growing up in a military household that made me hyper aware of these issues from the youngest of ages in a very personal way? or was it that i was born with these proclivities and they were informed by the environment i developed in?
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