Hey Susan, we're almost uguale in age and experience, and if we have different generational experiences, I'd say maybe big city (NYC) vs, I don't know where for you?????
Anyway born in '48: we're both early Boomers. Uni class of '69 -- part of the Columbia U campus revolt of 1968 -- not just a hippie, but also a fairly radical proponent of SDS and the Black Student Movement against Columbia's slumlording in Harlem. Maybe when my country tried to pull me out of grad school in 70 to send me to die in 'Nam is what cemented my viewpoint into poison; I can't say for sure. But I condemn all the resistance I saw in my generation to those liberation ideas back then and the pro-war ROTC idiots I knew, who never changed and became the neocons that take the US empire into perennial war. Apologies if you see any of this applying to you personally, From your posts, I sincerely doubt that.
PS I remember McCarthy era but mostly in retrospect; maybe that's a difference your extra few yrs conveys?
My family lives in Washington DC, so we are both from a big-city area. I don't remember that we were active in the larger Italian community, if any, but my great-grandparents had 12 children, so we were pretty much an entire community by ourselves.
I didn't like the pro-war students either, or the ones who complained that the demonstrations made it hard for them to get to class, which they needed in order to get out into the world and start making money.
We don't seem to be THAT different in age to account for the interest in the McCarthy goings-on, but I remember that I was pretty interested in politics when I was very young. Maybe it was talked about more in my family?
Yeah, I think you hit the differences, DC politics, big family cluster. My family was small and my bro and I were more into sci tech. And I lived on the streets of Bklyn so a lot of street sports. Not very political until HS; then the radicalization at uni was a real kick in the head to me. So it's clear we came to our current views in pretty different ways, yours maybe more gradual and well-informed, mine more jagged with a huge experiential explosion over 3 years in the late 60s -- the prime time for such experiences. I can't admit here to the specific fungus that a tech and I grew in my lab in grad school, later consumed with joy (oops).
Actually, I have to say that I still got a "kick in the head" (though I wouldn't put it that way) when I went to San Francisco. I learned many things that I had been more or less protected from. That's why I became a hippy.
Ah, San Francisco. That would do it. I didn't include that my HS journey was all about academics to get into the Ivy League to then get into an Ivy League Med school. Mission accomplished. And here's the punch line that reveals what '68 thru '70 did to my head. After all that hustle, I dropped out after one semester when I got a good whiff of what the culture of western medicine was really like from the inside. It repulsed me, drove me into academia and teaching. So the impact of those years was very real -- affecting the rest of my journey.
I went back to school in my 30s to go to medical school because I had lived in West Virginia and whole counties didn't have any medical facilities. I wanted to be a rural doctor and live on a small farm.
When I was in West Virginia in 1972, 80-acre farms were being sold for $200.
Hey Susan, we're almost uguale in age and experience, and if we have different generational experiences, I'd say maybe big city (NYC) vs, I don't know where for you?????
Anyway born in '48: we're both early Boomers. Uni class of '69 -- part of the Columbia U campus revolt of 1968 -- not just a hippie, but also a fairly radical proponent of SDS and the Black Student Movement against Columbia's slumlording in Harlem. Maybe when my country tried to pull me out of grad school in 70 to send me to die in 'Nam is what cemented my viewpoint into poison; I can't say for sure. But I condemn all the resistance I saw in my generation to those liberation ideas back then and the pro-war ROTC idiots I knew, who never changed and became the neocons that take the US empire into perennial war. Apologies if you see any of this applying to you personally, From your posts, I sincerely doubt that.
PS I remember McCarthy era but mostly in retrospect; maybe that's a difference your extra few yrs conveys?
My family lives in Washington DC, so we are both from a big-city area. I don't remember that we were active in the larger Italian community, if any, but my great-grandparents had 12 children, so we were pretty much an entire community by ourselves.
I didn't like the pro-war students either, or the ones who complained that the demonstrations made it hard for them to get to class, which they needed in order to get out into the world and start making money.
We don't seem to be THAT different in age to account for the interest in the McCarthy goings-on, but I remember that I was pretty interested in politics when I was very young. Maybe it was talked about more in my family?
Yeah, I think you hit the differences, DC politics, big family cluster. My family was small and my bro and I were more into sci tech. And I lived on the streets of Bklyn so a lot of street sports. Not very political until HS; then the radicalization at uni was a real kick in the head to me. So it's clear we came to our current views in pretty different ways, yours maybe more gradual and well-informed, mine more jagged with a huge experiential explosion over 3 years in the late 60s -- the prime time for such experiences. I can't admit here to the specific fungus that a tech and I grew in my lab in grad school, later consumed with joy (oops).
Actually, I have to say that I still got a "kick in the head" (though I wouldn't put it that way) when I went to San Francisco. I learned many things that I had been more or less protected from. That's why I became a hippy.
Ah, San Francisco. That would do it. I didn't include that my HS journey was all about academics to get into the Ivy League to then get into an Ivy League Med school. Mission accomplished. And here's the punch line that reveals what '68 thru '70 did to my head. After all that hustle, I dropped out after one semester when I got a good whiff of what the culture of western medicine was really like from the inside. It repulsed me, drove me into academia and teaching. So the impact of those years was very real -- affecting the rest of my journey.
I went back to school in my 30s to go to medical school because I had lived in West Virginia and whole counties didn't have any medical facilities. I wanted to be a rural doctor and live on a small farm.
When I was in West Virginia in 1972, 80-acre farms were being sold for $200.
Is that what you ended up doing?
Gotta go
Your fungus wouldn't have been ergot, by any chance?
Psilocybe
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