reason for hope, he would continue to live with and serve the poor and to put his body on the line to oppose injustice—even if failure were assured—because it was the right thing to do. Carmen is one of those rare people who do not need hope in order to take costly moral political action. That did not mean, however, that outcomes were unimportant to him. He wanted to believe that our actions could make the world a better place. That is why he was asking us this question—he sincerely wanted to know what Jeremy and I thought about humanity’s realistic prospects.
“Maybe it is too late,” I answered soberly. “I really don’t know.”
We were living at “the end of history”3—the Cold War was over and capitalism had won, so the story went. Carmen, Jeremy, and I certainly did not believe the claim that “There is no alternative,”4 but neither did we see anything on the horizon resembling a threat to capitalism’s hegemony, or a prospect for a world with more social justice. Those who had stayed active in the remnants of the movements of the long 1960s seemed to be perpetually up against the culture. Ronald Reagan’s popularity—and all that went along with it—had a deeply demoralizing effect (not to mention the consequences of actual policies, from the PATCO5 strike to intervention in Latin America). As the millennium came to an end, everything felt hopeless and apocalyptic for young social justice–oriented radicals like me, who were new to the scene.
Protest and politics were still so new for me then. I had met Jeremy in Cuba the summer before. He was as charismatic as he was politically astute, and I liked him immediately. He had just served a month in jail for civil disobedience at the Pentagon. I was inspired to meet someone who was willing to make sacrifices for what he believed—to put his money where his mouth was. We bonded by making wisecracks about all the Socialist Workers Party members who made up about a third of our youth delegation to Cuba. We viewed them as do-nothings who only wanted to sell their newspaper, The Militant—we called it The Hesitant—at the periphery of protests that other people organized. Upon our return to the States, Jeremy introduced me to Carmen, and soon the two of them were mentoring me as I organized a campaign against Walmart’s grand opening in my hometown.
Righteousness and agency
My unlikely trip to Cuba, at age 18, had been made possible in large part by the fundraising efforts of the Philadelphia-based Cuba Support Coalition, and in part thanks to my parents’ present to me for (barely) graduating from high school. My parents’ sponsorship of an illegal trip to Cuba may make me sound like a “red diaper baby,” raised by radical communists. That’s nowhere close to the truth. I grew up conservative and relatively sheltered. I was brought up Mennonite on a farm outside of the tiny town of Bird-In-Hand in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Bird-In-Hand’s economy was based on agriculture and tourism. Tourists from New York City and around the world would come and stare from their cars at the Amish as the latter worked the land. The Amish were our neighbors, friends, and relatives, perfectly normal and boring—what was strange to us was why anyone would find them so interesting. As a Mennonite, my life revolved around church and family. I attended worship services at least twice a week, and attended Mennonite school, from Kindergarten onward.
Lancaster County was only a three-hour drive from that bar in the Lower East Side. Until only a few months prior I had lived my entire life in Lancaster. But now it seemed like a different universe and an eternity away. Though nowhere close to being a radical, my father had briefly flirted with the counter-culture at the tail end of the Vietnam War. The draft ended just one month before he would have come up for the lottery. When he was a high school senior, in 1971, he took an unauthorized “field trip” to Washington DC with his older brother for the May Day mass civil disobedience against the war. He and his brother even broke through a police line in order to avoid arrest. That was only seven years before I was born, the youngest of three children—but it probably seemed like an eternity away to my father by then. He and my mother, by age 25 and 23, respectively, had to provide for a family of five. Both of their families were poor, and neither of them had attended college. Economically, they had little choice but to settle down in their conservative community of origin and to forget about whatever alternative notions they may have briefly entertained. While they had no love for Ronald Reagan, they also hardly had a developed political analysis—or encouragement from anyone around them to pursue such a thing. My father took over managing a delicatessen stand at the Allentown Farmer’s Market, and my mother worked various odd jobs. Whether or not he made a conscious decision to do so, Dad’s social and economic survival strategy entailed shutting the hell up about his brief adventure in the counter-culture—so much so that all I ever caught wind of while growing up was seeing photos of him with long hair at age 19 working on a sail ship, and hearing a few stories about his hitchhiking adventures in Europe.
Indeed, the way I learned more about my father’s short-lived radicalism was from my conservative uncles, who brought it up when I started inarticulately questioning the status quo myself. Their intention was not encouragement, but rather to dismiss my newfound politics as a passing phase.
“Yeah, your dad used to go to protests too. Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it—just like he did.”
I was afraid that time would prove them right. The truth was, other than the deep intuitive sense of social justice that I had acquired, I had no idea what I was doing. Only a few short years before, I had just been a more-or-less “normal” kid in rural America. I spent way too much time watching television and playing video games. I was always trying to make a few bucks selling contraband at school, like noisemakers and bubblegum. I was not scholastically inclined—a few times I had to take summer classes to not repeat a grade. I was not remotely well-read. I had a weak sense of history and politics, let alone cosmopolitan culture. Looking back, my “not knowing any better” sometimes played out in comical ways. I remember sitting in the back of the car listening to adults discussing poverty, when I was in sixth grade. A light bulb went on in my head and I butted in enthusiastically with my surely original idea:
“What if everyone just took everything that they made together and shared it?”
“There’s a name for that!” my aunt snapped back at me, “It’s called communism!”
I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed really bad. Two years later, after a childhood of Mennonite education in which I had to memorize assigned Bible verses every week, I started to read the Bible on my own—less selectively than how it had been taught to me up until then, it turned out. Very soon I discovered that neither myself nor Karl Marx had invented the idea of sharing in common the product of everyone’s labor; Jesus Christ had spouted off about it two thousand years ago. And apparently it got him killed.
I became disillusioned as I read the Bible and discovered that the theology of individualistic salvation from eternal damnation had little basis in the scriptures, while social and economic justice was a central theme. I studied the gospels and the prophets and began reading about the global economy at the same time, applying the message of the former to the contemporary world in which I found myself awakening. I hadn’t yet heard of liberation theology, but I was deeply inspired by the prophets and how they stood up, sometimes all alone, on behalf of the poor and oppressed, to admonish the rich and powerful—often at great personal cost. I wanted to be like them. I felt myself called to the wilderness. At age 17 I told my parents that I was leaving home to follow that calling.
I left with $200, a backpack, and no plan other than to zealously seek whatever I might find. I hitchhiked from Pennsylvania up into New England, and then across the Midwest, camping in fields and forests and relying on the generosity of strangers. I prayed and fasted and read the Bible, while taking a month to circle Lake Michigan. I didn’t have any of the mystical visions that I may have been hoping for. But I worked through a great deal of fear. It wasn’t hitchhiking or strangers or sleeping alone in the woods that frightened me—all of these things delighted me. What scared me to my core were the unsettling feelings I increasingly felt the more I learned about the structures of society, the economy, and
