On the other hand, I lived in a small town in upstate New York, and I thought I would die of asphyxiation. I left after two years. It takes a person much stronger than I ....
Also, my son is 22, goes to San Francisco State, does not have the discipline/passion for the library card and the solitude, but does get inspired taking history classes from good lefty profs. I'm glad they're around for his sake.
Joanna
Jim Straub wrote:
> It's a touchy thing to get into--- who works hard, who works right,
> who is to blame for our historic weakness as a class and movement. I
> don't want to broadly indict college people for being college people.
> And it is good to have a small bastion in at least one part of society
> for the left.
>
> But. I do think it's not going overboard for us to work forward from
> a statement like this:
> "Leftists (less than 5% of the population at least) talk much more to
> each other than to the other 95%." I would tentatively add to that
> statement the idea that this fact has more to do with our weakness
> than most questions of ideology and strategy.
>
> Working forward from this, I usually maintain that if people are
> making choices about where to put their lives, time and energy, I
> encourage:
>
> -Don't move to NYC, the SF Bay Area, or any liberal college town.
>
> -Don't go to college except for a specific skill or trade. All you
> need to study 'poly sci', 'labor studies', or history is a library
> card and a job. Don't go to grad school. Don't become a college
> professor.
>
> Maybe it reeks of presumption for a 26 year old to dispense such
> advice so freely. But I don't think it's crazy for us to assume that
> as a movement, we have enough folks organizing in Berkeley, Madison,
> teaching lit crit at fancy colleges, writing books about whatever
> textual fad is popular among the tenured gibberish pros this year.
> The elan that moved generations of earlier revolutionaries to build a
> core of radical autoworkers in detroit, move to youngstown to organize
> in steel in the 30s, do radical stuff like voter reg in missippi in
> the 60s, open a women's liberation center in dayton ohio in the 70s,
> even accept the draft and organize against the war inside the army...
> we could make our guiding light more than our current base in
> universities, sects and subcultures now.
>
> Like I said, I ain't against intellectuals. Just ones who only talk
> to other intellectuals. Which is plenty of em. No?
> J
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 1, 2006, at 3:12 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> > We don't try hard enough. We don't do the work.
>
> Really? I'm not sure of that. I know lots of left intellectuals
> who've gone to work for unions, as researchers and organizers. They
> work very hard. I know lots of antiwar organizers in NYC who obsess
> about the fact that the antiwar movement is too white and upscale,
> and they try very hard to diversify it. People try. It's not clear
> that the audience is there.
>
> Doug
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>
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