http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=13781
by GL Rowsey
July 14, 2009
So there we were. My gay housemate along for psychological support,
and me, waiting in one of those ubiquitous pavilions at Stanford,
outside an office and next to a plain sign saying "Interviews 2 pm".
It was in the spring of my third year in law school. And I'd been
sharing a house with a gay classmate that third year of our
incarceration, after introducing quite a few of my classmates to the
pleasures of smoking marijuana for two years.
I'd also been contemplating the possibility of being shipped to
Vietnam. Students up the peninsula and across the Bay were already
listening to the wind saying "Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out" but
Stanford was a long way from Berkeley and with my credentials, it
hadn't occurred to me that I could. (In fact, turn on, tune in, and
drop out is exactly what I did do, over a period of about five years
beginning that spring of 1966, but I didn't even understand I'd begun
the journey at the time. What I did understand was that I did not
want to practice law, and I did not want to go to Vietnam. And if I
joined the CIA, I could stay stateside with a job which my family
wouldn't consider dishonorable.)
So there we were. My gay housemate along for psychological support,
and me, waiting in one of those ubiquitous pavilions at Stanford,
outside an office and next to a plain sign saying "Interviews 2 pm".
I remember walking into the interview room, seeing a man behind a
desk, and sitting down. But that's it. My memory's a blank
concerning the interview itself. Later in the afternoon, I remember
telling my gay roomie that the absurdity of my being there had turned
every word in my head to water. I thought that the interviewer
expected me to tell him the truth, and the truth was that I was
sharing a house with a homosexual and breaking the law against
possession of marijuana every day.
Maybe I just got up after looking at the man for a while, and walked out.
The next year or sometime during the next ten, as I drifted undrafted
around California and the American Southwest and dropped farther ever
farther out, it dawned on me that: (1) Getting military and CIA
recruiters off campus at UC-Berkeley was a big part of what got the
Free Speech Movement rolling in 1964; and (2) most interviewees with
CIA recruiters in 1966 probably lied, and the recruiters expected it,
and the interviewees simply were worldly-wise enough to not give a
damn. They knew that no legal consequences would follow telling lies
to a CIA interviewer. Because, well because....it was a far, far
different world back in 1966.
"How could I fail to speak with difficulty? I have new things to say."
I graduated from Stanford Law School in 1966 but have never
practiced. Instead, I dropped back five years and joined The
Movement, but it wasn't until the 1970's that I began writing serious
prose. By 1978, I was too old to live on the streets and sweat out
going to jail, so I got a serious job as a GS-4, clerk-typist with
the US Forest Service. I retired 23 years later, as head of the
regionwide Claims Program in the California Region, headquartered in
San Francisco for 20 years and then moved to Mare Island, in Vallejo.
(That early school training always catches up with us, sooner or later.)
I still live in the greater Vallejo area, and I still have radical
politics. Last year my major project was contributing to the ending
of the Iraq war, with a minor in ending the embargo of Cuba. This
year, I'm a little confused, but what the hey, who's not?
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment