When you reach 80, you can’t avoid looking back at how you and the world have fared, and how this compares with the hopes and expectations from your youth. I grew up in Los Angeles, in a mostly supportive middle-class life. My father was pretty far left and had me read, at age 15, not only Marx (boring) but Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” which turned me into an “intellectual idealist” type of communist. In the same year, 1949, he introduced me to Anna Louise Strong, I think the only communist elected to major office in the U.S. [she served on the Seattle School Board in the late 1910s].
By 17 I already knew I would become a professor, so after college I came to Seattle in 1955 to graduate school, where I co-founded the University of Washington chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and joined the Socialist Party.
So, as of 1960, I was an ardent young idealist and optimist, and I expected that we were moving to a more peaceful and fair world, economically, racially and by gender and lifestyle, despite reality.
After a year in Chicago, I went to the University of Lund in Sweden for a post-doc. Extensive travel in eastern Europe taught me fast that “state socialism” in action was as bad as the evil big capitalist, since in both systems, greed and the lust for power undermined the ideal collective or market. But I also realized I was in the best realistic system, a social democracy, which worked to prevent monopoly power in both the economy and government.
Back in Seattle in 1961, I began my 44 years of teaching, with great rewards, including nudging hundreds of students leftward.
The 1960s were exciting years of social action, with many major successes — the Congress of Racial Equality, which played a role in the Civil Rights Movement, the passage of open housing policies in 1969 that outlawed discrimination against renters and home buyers, the rise of women’s rights and the war on poverty — despite the Vietnam War.
While the region and nation continue to creep two steps forward, one back with respect to social rights, it is distressing that we’ve moved backward on poverty, race relations and incarceration. The best years were 1973 to 1975, before the rise of globalism and the Reagan-era tax cuts, leading inexorably to the most extreme economic inequality since the 19th century and deepening the country’s racial malaise. But hooray for Seattle, with its election of a socialist, Kshama Sawant, to the city council and its upcoming $15-an-hour minimum wage.
So now in 2014 my youthful optimism is gone, shattered by the continuing power of individual, corporate and collective greed and intolerance. While the improved rights of women and of sexual minorities are real, they are not at all secure, including in the U.S. Racial animosity and inequality remain severe with no solution in sight. The risk of brutal war is no lower than it was 50 or 100 years ago. The horrendous threat of global overpopulation is ignored, perhaps as there is nothing that can be done. Global warming? Same story.
The decline of quality education, especially in the U.S., from kindergarten through university is revealed in voting patterns and surveys of people who discredit evolution.
But one can never give up. I believe economic inequality is at the core of national and world malaise and is an issue that can be overcome We can fight for meaningful and fair tax rates for the rich, a higher national minimum wage and, even here in Washington state, an income tax. At last.