Posted on 10/21/2005 9:12:49 AM PDT by Our man in washington
An excerpt can't do it justice. Please follow the link. The article is long but worth the read.
Who?
You ask "who?" That would be David Horowitz. Writer, publisher, speaker, ex-leftist. He knows the radical left pretty well, and does a good job exposing the way they truly behave.
Well worth the read.
David grew up with communist parents. I am tired of the term radical left. We are dealing with communists who are the base of the democrat party. I haven't read this article yet but I will read it when I get home later.
Good point about the use of terms. I agree we shouldn't try to pretend there's a difference between communists and radical leftists.
That was amazing. What a beautiful writer Mr. Horowitz is.
Yes it was. In some ways, for me, a journey down memory lane. I broke up with my high school sweetheart six months before I was drafted in 1967. Two years later, when I returned home on leave, now enlisted and on my way to OCS, I looked up my sweetheart. She had a baby, no husband and a heroine habit. This was 1969 and the worst was yet to come. I have seen her a few times since and mutual friends used to keep me appraised of her "condition". I haven't heard anything for over ten years.
Drugs, I believe, are the true "Forbidden Fruit" of the Garden of Eden. The heroine poppy has been around since before "Genesis". The Biblical account is an ancient metaphor for the destruction that this natural substance, when abused, causes. I thought of my "sweetheart" as I read this article and contemplated her suffering. I hope she's OK.
ping for later read
Lovely tribute. I'm watching a family member go "into the valley of the dead" as she put it and it's a tough, merciless thing to watch.
What a read. Yes, a real tear jerker. Susan lived a hell, but even the brief time she had with some sobriety and happiness is more than most junkies end up with. I'm amazed that she lived as long as she did, and continued to work, knit, write. And after all of it her daughter still ended up being proud of her. There can be no other explanation except that she was truly a product of God's mercy and grace. I hope at some point before she died she acknowledged that fact.
Touching story. Very much worth the read. David Horowitz is a fine writer.
sorry to hear that, i am a survivor of all that.
" My God is so high, you can't get over him
My God is so low, you can't get under him
My God is so wide, you can't get around him
You must come in at the door"
I dunno. I lived in Berkeley at the same time as these people and I felt nothing but revulsion for their "women's awareness groups", etc. We shouldn't look back on Ramparts Magazine with any nostalgia. They were partly responsible for the lives of abandon of the "hippie" culture and the "radical left".
What a wasted life this woman led! She had a first rate education, a talented husband, a beautiful child, and she threw it all away. In the end, she is remembered for a stupid article that didn't even represent original thought.
This tribute is an excellent example of the narcissim and navel gazing of the women's movement, the left in general, and from the main stream media to laud this woman's life as a shining example of anything. I can't believe that Horowitz spent so many words on this vapid woman.
Congrats on coming out alive and ahead of the game.
I pray a lot.
Wow honey - don't hold back - you'll explode!
Nice to see you around again.
As you might guess, I have a different opinion. The article shows the failure of the leftist way of life. The point of the story is not that Susan is a hero, but that she's an interesting case study.
Sorry if you think that I am harsh, but folks like Susan (and yes, David Horowitz too) destroyed my town (Berkeley) and my University and forced my family to flee -- first to neighboring Piedmont, CA and then to Texas -- to protect my children from this kind of dreadful influence.
Side note: I actually encountered David Horowitz in front of my neighborhood hardware store during the period he is writing about in his ode to Susan when I asked him to sign a petition to save our schools. He was rude and obnoxious to me, a mother with a baby in a stroller and two children under 4 hanging on to her skirt. (The kindergartner was in school at the time.
I was wearing my best and most stylish Italian knit suit and heels, and he looked me up and down and declared, with the greatest contempt, that he wouldn't sign the innocuous petition I was circulating asking that the teachers be consulted in any plan that the school board imposed on our schools because he could tell BY THE WAY I WAS DRESSED that I probably wouldn't sign HIS petition against the Viet Nam War. I stared him hard in the eye and said, "Try me." Of course he was bluffing, and he had no petition. He and his Communist friends were more attuned to violence than petitioning.
I spent uncounted hours of precious family time (as did my husband) working with various groups to counter propaganda from these "free thinkers" in our schools and in the neighborhood in general. They destroyed the city, and finally my home state -- California.
Of course, I became a conservative Republican along the way. Would I do anything different today? Probably not, but sometimes I wish I had that time back so that I could have taken better care of other things in my life.
You are absolutely correct in writing that the article shows the failure of the leftist way of life. It's just that Horowitz is just a little too glowing in his tribute to his old friend.
Don't you wonder what her parents thought all those years ago about their beloved daughter, whom they'd struggled to provide a Vassar education, who was now a junkie, a thief, and a prostitute? Don't you feel sorry for the shame and grief they must have felt in their old age? And who raised that daughter? I certainly hope she went to live with her father while Susan was hooking for drugs. And what about the 5 aborted souls who never had a chance at life at all? May God have Mercy on her.
I am heartbroken for all the damaged and broken people she left behind. Not Susan. She made her own conscious choices and abused her own body, apparently with no thought to the havoc she was wreaking upon those around her.
She was not living in a vacuum all those years without any research or other evidence that what she was doing to herself and others was harmful. There was plenty written at the time about the damaging effects that her choices would have on herself and others. She chose to ignore all those warnings and to pursue her own selfish ends and to try to persuade others to follow her on that fateful trip.
Susan could knit a scarf around the world with gold thread, and I wouldn't be impressed. There was a legion of women like her in Berkeley in the 1960s, and they are still affecting our society for the worse.
Wrong. The fruit forbidden, came from the "tree of KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL. If drugs are the key to knowledge, then you are wrong...
God gave little guidance, that we can read about, to Adam and Eve, in the garden. He told them that they could not eat from that tree.
He knew they would... They were part of His plan of redemption. He gave us that plan. He is omniscient.
Drug use is nothing new. Jesus turned water into ALCOHOL CONTAINING wine, at a wedding feast. They ran out, and the party was still going strong. Jesus' mom asked Him to save the host some embarrassment. Instead, Jesus made the host into a good fellow, by furnishing the BEST WINE, altered from a pot of water!
After the Ark settled, Noah came out onto dry land, and got so drunk, he was dancing naked. His daughters had to cover his nakedness, the Scripture tells us. God had just gotten through with a flood, wiping out all the unrighteous from the earth. I guess God considered Noah to be righteous.
Drug use, alcohol use, or watching TV, are just choices. The option of doing anything, injesting, or inhaling something, which makes you feel "better", is part of the human condition. Excessive use is another thing. That is called "personal responsibility".
Sin is the problem. Missing the mark, as an arrow sent to a bullseye, is the definition of sin. Anything less than that perfect hit, is going to kill you, without faith... in the Lamb of God.
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