I went to the 9/11neocon "connect-up" last month. Since then I have been thinking about how fortunate I've been in my life.
When I was born and well into my high school years there was only one world that anyone imagined: a socialist world. That vision became shakier and shakier throughout my life and finally it has been replaced. I went to a Kibbutz after college (Recent photo on right). With that experience, a job in a Soviet style union shop and the help of George Orwell's Animal Farm I got rid of any personal socialist inclinations. But the world around me didn't begin to change for decades.
I lived from the beginning to the end of
the Cold War. I was terrified of nuclear war in the 1950s when people I
knew were building bomb shelters. I was in the Army and was called to
active duty during the Cuban and Berlin crises. I personally knew many
important Cold War figures including Richard Nixon and Cap Weinberger.
I was in the USSR at the peak of the Cold War hostilities in 1982 and
walked the streets of Leningrad and Moscow. I went to Berlin, Prague
and Budapest immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've since
been to Havana and seen the havoc of a forty year communist reign of
tyranny.
I was also deeply involved in the greatest voluntary human experiment
in history, the Hippy Era. I was at the center of the hippy storm; on
the Board of the Whole Earth Catalog, president of the Point
Foundation, Business Manager of Glide Church, founder of the Briarpatch
Network, friend of nearly everyone in the Hippy milieu and especially
close to the mother of all hippies, Salli Rasberry. I enjoyed the full
sexual freedom of the era and was an active participant in the National
Sex and Drug Forum films and trainings.
In the early 1960s I saw the end of class in America and the rise of merit. No other society in history has gotten rid of class, without a peep, without any self consciousness about the achievement.
At the same time, with the Papal Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, I saw anti-Semitism in America drop to the lowest level it has ever been in any society.
Now I have been surrounded by people who can hear the Second Voice...the world of Pro Commerce. I get to read the Weekly Standard, Azure, The Claremont Review of Books, Commentary and dozens of brilliant writers from Jonathan Israel to Michael Oren.
I am indeed fortunate.