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eighteen Barbara All through high school I was always aware how I was going back, rediscovering my own experiences, and realizing how my own experiences were vastly different from those of most people. I never doubted their validity, never questioned them. When I got to college, and found myself in Canada, where people didn’t know from such things, I became almost bitter. I wanted a vacation. I wanted a vacation from political people, from the United States, from the Vietnam War, from the construction workers who attacked the protestors, and from the student Left. It didn’t make any sense to me. It all seemed much too tangled. And I just mostly hibernated and studied the German novelist Thomas Mann. That summer, 1969, I went across the United States in a VW bus with four other people, and it was horrible—at least, the bus and four other people. It was like being a tourist, discovering a new land, and not immediately feeling at home. But I really liked America. I liked the weather-beaten faces of the sheepherders in Idaho, and I liked the middle Americans from Kansas who would go down to the lake every Sunday with a motorboat to picnic and to lead the comfortable life. And I liked the fields and the freaks you would find wandering around, peering out into space, wrapped in purple cloaks bouncing around the fields and the prairies, down in New Mexico. And we’d ask, “What are you doing here?” “Oh,” and they’d pause, “we’re just looking for peyote,” then pick something and chuck it into their big sack. I went back to Canada that fall, suddenly looked around and said, “What on earth am I doing here? What do I really want to do with my life? I want to be in politics, right! And there’s no politics here for me. I want to learn A RED FAMILY 133 about American history, and there’s no American history here. I want to read American novels, and there’s no good course in American literature here. What am I doing here?” I stuck it out a couple of months and came back to New York after Christmas. And I got a job working in a hospital in New York—University Hospital of New York University. I thought that working in a hospital not only would be a good place to do politics but it would be a good place to learn something about the rest of the world. I stayed there six months and made a lot of enemies in the administration. A few people there had been doing some political work before I got there. I got in contact with them, and we decided to resurrect the group: two black guys, who really had a hard time of it, and Ray, an Irish guy from Cleveland. We put out a newspaper about what was happening in the hospital and organized demonstrations in the spring around the invasion of Cambodia. I guess working with these different people, and being in New York again, helped me realize that politics keeps happening. It hadn’t ended when my father got out of jail. All the things I knew then about politics still applied. People were still suffering, and people in politics were still being persecuted, and it all began to make sense in a way it hadn’t before. Upuntilthattime,Ihadbeenabletoromanticizeradicalpolitics,thestudent politics that was going on in the United States, and not give it proper measure. I hadn’t really understood what it meant and what had motivated it. I guess that was partially because of my parents and because of what they would say: their misgivings about a lot of what they had done, and not only them but many of their friends. I had come in contact with a lot of people who would say about the New Left, “Oh no! They’re making the same mistakes we did! Why don’t they learn?” Which, of course, is ridiculous, because the experiences of one generation aren’t always, and can’t possibly be, apparent to another. When my friend Atina was being kicked out of the University of Chicago, I wrote her a letter saying: “Atina, don’t! You’re going to ruin your life. Look what happened to my father. Look what happened to all those other people. Don’t mess yourself up!” She was furious with me. I thought that I was the...

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