European Unions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>It's clear you haven't gotten to the post with my apology in it, so I'll
>offer it again. I thought it was Rakesh, not you, who wrote it. And as I
>said before, it was a bit over my head, thus "crap" -- not in the sense that
>the argument (to the extent I understood it) was useless or ridiculous, but
>simply because I had no real meaning to me.
>
>Perhaps I should explain myself a little better, since I'm getting tagged as
>"anti-intellectual." I'm self-taught. I crawled out of high school with a
>C-minus average and never went to college. I struggled through dyslexia
>before they even knew what to call it (I still have some problems with it).
>I didn't really begin to read "serious" books until my late 20s, and even
>then I struggled with some of the heavier tomes (like Marx and Engels).
>Chomsky was the first intellectual I really understood, and he was (and
>remains) a huge influence on me. I got what he was saying politically (as
>for the linguistics . . . ), and I began to apply this knowledge to my life.
>That is what led me to join FAIR when it first started, and I've been on
>"the left" ever since.
>
>So even though I've written two published books, and am at work on my third,
>I still have trouble understanding a lot of the heavier political talk on
>display here. I work with blue-collar people to supplement my writing. Most
>of them are black and poor and are not prone to talking politics. I do
>broach subjects now and then, and apart for some general hostility to the
>White Man (myself excluded, I guess), there really isn't much in the way of
>discussion. They're not stupid; just uninformed.
>
>That is why I criticize some of the posts here. They seem to take place in a
>world far away from the one I live in. Again, not that that makes them
>useless. But they often do not relate to the people who need to be related
>to.
>
>DP

Maybe you have an impression that folks who post here live surrounded 
by those who are committed to Marxism & socialist revolution as well 
as reading Rimbaud & Baudelaire (in Columbus, Ohio?  Give me a 
break!).  That's not at all the case.  Folks to whom I have to talk 
as an activist include those who yell at me, "Get a job!"  "Go back 
to where you come from!"  And so on.  That's America.  Don't complain 
& keep organizing.  At least you got "some general hostility to the 
White Man" (= an incipient political consciousness) going among your 
co-workers.  That's a great point of departure.

Yoshie