Maggie's Farm

Back in 1973 or so, I was happily and busily establishing our local SDS group at my high school, sharing with everyone who would listen to me the story behind why we were killing thousands of peaceful little farmers in SE Asia, mocking the oh-so-young-looking Young Republican guys in their nice K-Mart suits and freshly-scoured pink faces, and boldly rejecting the sellout philosophy of my parents' generation that allowed them to sit back in happy ignorance of the world and allow their government to murder and steal globally in their name.

We were Egos-R-Us to the bone. We knew that we were concerned with people and their lives and their right to happiness, while The Others were able to simply pretend that other people didn't really count, which allowed them to take actions and think thoughts that we knew that they must know were evil. I often wondered who they served, and how otherwise smart people could just completely ignore other people's needs and miseries. I mean, we liberals fought to feed poor people, while the Repubs fought to improve corporate profits - how could any thinking person end up on the wrong side of that particular divide?

I was also building a race car in our back shed at the time (it was a five-year project by then, when I was 17) and I needed some welding done, and had no welder. There was this long-hair older guy I had met at the local dirt track who welded, and I asked him if he could do a quick weld for me, and so he stopped by one day.

We ended up hanging out in that shed and all around for about a year, as we were sort of similar guys in some respects. Turned out he had come back from Viet Nam some months before I met him, and before that, he was an econ major at some big school out in Chicago.

I gradually figured out that this guy was one of THOSE people - a conservative! - who did a good job of hiding it. I made it my mission to show him how and why his thinking was all frigged up. Didn't work that way, though.

Gradually, as he shared his experiences and his econ background, it became apparent that my own knowledge of important facts and philosophies and concepts was woefully, embarrassingly superficial. For a guy who was certain of the rightness of his thoughts, who was sure that his concern for other peoples' lives was a force for moral goodness - well, it was troubling at first, and then it was crushing.

So, my concern that we stop murdering poor asian farmers turns out to have been a great gift to murderous dictators who wanted to slaughter and enslave those same farmers in huge numbers, for venal reasons, while our "murderous government" had actually been concerned that said murderous dictators held to a vision of gradual global takeover that needed to be quelled. I was on the wrong side there.

And, my concern that we take just a bit more out of obscenely-huge corporate profits and feed the poor would have cost economic growth, and many jobs, and much aid that was already going to those poor but which would dry up once jobs went away and taxes couldn't be collected. I was on the wrong side there, too.

And those evil corporate types - the managers and owners of businesses - turned out to be mostly a disciplined group of accountants and hard workers who, by the rules in place, operated businesses so that they benefited the shareholders and the workers and their communities, and who couldn't afford to let it all hang out and get high with the rest of us and stop obsessing about profits, because business managers who did that kind of thing - who weren't sort of anally compulsive about order and logic and good bookkeeping - couldn't keep a business going at all, and those businesses were what allowed the rest of us to eat. So, again, wrong team.

The biggest lesson? That all of those evil corporate-thug types, all of those mindless Republicans, those conformist suburban parents - they all were as concerned with hunger and pain and death as was I.

They were just much better at doing something about it.

So, after that, I took the time to learn about what I had once only disparaged, and it turns out - here's the life lesson - that I hadn't been picking very well, and that to pick well, one had to do the studying first.