I'm Not So Much Against The War

What Was On The Agenda Was School And Social Life And Those Kinds Of Things. So I Was The Middle Of Five Kids. So I Had The Great Advantage Of Being Able To Play Up To The Older Kids And Play Down To The Younger Kids And I Think That's Part Of What Propelled Me To Become A Teacher At Some Point In My Life. But It Was A Comfortable Childhood. It Was A Privileged Childhood.

Living In A Bubble As I Said In A Featherbed Of Privilege. That's Why Leaving Home, Leaving The Prep School And Going To The University Of Michigan In The Early '60s Was A Moment Of Awakening And To Go To A Place Like Michigan And To See Suddenly A World In Flames And The Injustices All Around Was Quite A Wake Up Call. I Lasted A Year And A Half At Michigan Before I Dropped Out And Joined The Merchant Marines And I Was A Merchant Marine For My Sophomore Year Then I Came Back To Michigan.

I Think That You're Smarter Than We Were, But We Had Two Things: One Is, In Our Naïveté We Believed We Could Change The World. And Number Two, We Believed That Another World Was Possible. And Once That Belief Took Hold Of Some Critical Mass, A Tiny Minority Nonetheless, But A Critical Mass Of People, Then The World Did Change.

The President Of The University Said That Night, Congratulations To You The Students, You've Won A Great Victory, Now The War Will End. And I'm Certain That He Believed It That Night And I Believed It And We Went Away Happy. Four Days Later, Martin Luther King Was Assassinated. Two Months After That, Kennedy Was Assassinated. Two Months After That, Henry Kissinger Emerged From The Swamp He Was Living In At Harvard With A Plan To Expand The War.

When I Was Arrested Opposing The War In Vietnam In 1965, As I Said About 20 Or 30% Of People Were Opposed To The War. By 1968, More Than Half Of Americans Were Opposed To The War. If You Pull In Europeans, Canadians, People From Around The Third World, The War Was Vastly Unpopular. But Even Half Of Americans By 1968 Opposed The War.