On Jul 17, 2008, at 11:41 AM, Julio Huato quoted Howard Zinn:
> It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological
> experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to
> talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we
> were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our
> lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us,
> startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly
> fixed in our consciousness--embedded there by years of family
> prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and
> television.
Is that really true? I suspect there's a lot of continuity between parents' politics and their kids' politics. I recall that someone - Richard Freeman maybe? - did a survey of campus anti-sweatshop activists in the late 1990s and found a very large share of them had parents who were activists of some sort in the 1960s. And just last night we were talking with a friend who's in Solidarity who said that many of her comrades with grown kids reported their offspring to be involved in radical politics in some way. I'm guessing these "aha!" conversion experiences are unusual. Not unheard of but not the norm.
Doug