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.
It was really meant as more of a joke - holding back and all (which I've not known you to do). I hope you didn't take it personally, it wasn't meant that way.
I didn't realize you had a history like that and I'm sorry for dredging it up - your story was as moving as his (and MUCH shorter and easier to read). Thanks for the perspective - it's always helpful and insightful.
Read your mail.
A life of hedonism does not equal 'a great woman'....
I see no reflection of greatness....just a life of selfish actions, and very wrong choices.
The Left doesn't understand why their indulgent lifestyle can be so enormously destructive, to say the least. Susan Lydon's untimely death should be held up as an example of what we should NOT end up being.
You're a demented moron.
Go sell crazy somewhere else. We're all full up here!
Regards, Buck.-eljerko
Interesting FReepmail. I guess our definition of "crazy" is different!
Post not worthy of reply.
Not a problem. I guess that period of my life represents a real "coming of age". A lot of my illusions were dashed. First, JFK was asassinated just after we purchased our first house. You can't imagine what a shock that was to everybody!
That event (Nov. 1963) was quickly followed by the advent of the "Free Speech Movement" (February 1964) started by interloper Mario Savio at the Berkeley campus. The FSM quickly degenerated into the "Filthy Speech Movement" aimed at out new Governor, Ronald Reagan, and punctuated by a buxom young woman who liked to get her picture in the paper wearing a see-through blouse and no underwear. She was arrested several times at the Berkeley Public Library in that get up.
So now, both the UC campus (where we used to picnic on Sundays) and the Berkeley Public Library were off limits to families with children, and that was just the beginning.
All this while, drug use had started to escalate, and people who should have known better touted the "mind expanding" benefits of "tripping". In the mean time these same characters started meddling with our schools until it became impossible to live there, and I had to sell my house and get out of town. They also started committing every kind of public offense you could imagine -- the more disgusting the better, in their eyes -- public nudity, public urination and defecation, public copulation, riots, property damage, taking over private property, non-negotiable demands, public threats against "normal" citizens, etc. were the norm. They toppled our society and made living in Berkeley a living Hell. By 1968 the anti-war riots were in full swing with the National Guard on our streets every day, tear gas wafting through the halls of the University, and plywood over the windows of most of the businesses on main street -- Shattuck Ave. Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs were added to the list of daily offenses.
In 1968, we moved to the most conservative community around (descriped by a local columnist/pundit as a "white Republican enclave where all the old ladies have blue hair" -- the "dread Piedmontese" he used to call them) only to be followed there within 5 years by many of the same people who had originally agitated in Berkeley to make all these reforms and now found they couldn't live with them. Berkeley schools were now a mess, and the community had established more private schools per capita than any other place in California. Of course they couldn't leave Piedmont schools alone -- they had to start pushing them to become just a little more "free & enlightened". Very few families emerged from this culture intact and unscathed.
We took our first opportunity to accept a transfer to Texas in 1973 and never looked back. We visit from time to time, but I am so glad that I got out of there when I did. I am sorry for the time I spent trying to "fix" it when I lived there, however. It was like trying to hold back the tide with a shovel! LOL
What you say is true.
Horowitz knows American commies... inside & out.
"This is the terrible consequence of the disconnect between everything that is human and the drug-craving individual. After all is said in done, the human mind is a schizoid construction of instinct and reason: the intellect will justify anything that comes between the animal and its need."
Thanks for posting an evocative and provocative article.
And for those on this thread who are prone to harsh judgements, I can only caution them to: "ask not for whom the bell tolls......"
I couldn't get this poor woman out of my mind all weekend and I couldn't even explain to anyone what was bothering me.
I guess it was because I sat in some of those early "female consciousness raising" groups early on (through co-operative nursery school meetings) and found them stupid. But some of my friends thought those sessions were great and really bought the whole lie. Of course we parted ways, and they ended up divorced, suicided, and who knows where.
I suppose instead of still being a little angry about what went on, I should be even more thankful that none of it ever affected me and my family, except to make us die hard conservatives! LOL.
I couldn't get this poor woman out of my mind all weekend and I couldn't even explain to anyone what was bothering me.
I guess it was because I sat in some of those early "female consciousness raising" groups early on (through co-operative nursery school meetings) and found them stupid. But some of my friends thought those sessions were great and really bought the whole lie. Of course we parted ways, and they ended up divorced, suicided, and who knows where.
I suppose instead of still being a little angry about what went on, I should be even more thankful that none of it ever affected me and my family, except to make us die hard conservatives! LOL.
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