Reply #73: The Kansas City area. I saw The Beatles at Arrowhead stadium and felt the world change, in 1964.

[patrice]

Concerts, by national and local names, have been an important part of my intellectual life ever since (that is until this last 10 years or so). I debated the proposition "There should be an international organization to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons", pro and con, all over the state my sophmore year in highschool; this sensitized me lots to the powers of government and to international issues. Seeing the picture of the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire (in Life? or Look? magazine) affected me deeply and I followed news of the war in the media, though I never actually encountered an opportunity to protest it. Messages about Free Love resonated with my Catholic upbringing and my family was kind of outsiders anyway, so the other ideas just sort of fit. Believe it or not, there was a time in the late '60s when Catholic schools taught you how to think about Social Justice. My Dad was a Union leader (he helped to start his local) and he was foreman on big construction projects who told stories about Racism on the job. Thinking was encouraged in my large family and my older brother at college lead the way at the dinner table. My husband to be (from Buffalo NY) and I were reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Miller's Canticle for Lewibowitz, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, Vonnegut, Alan Watts, Baba Ram Dass lots of others, including most of Ayn Rand's fiction. When my two children were big enough to allow me to get to college, I immediately found Plow Shares folks and Nuclear Freeze activities, all of which appealed to my sense of Economic Justice. I actually helped organize and lead one march and participated in another down Kansas Avenue in Topeka. After college, I taught and learned from highschool seniors mostly.

Life's challenges have pretty much confirmed what is real and what isn't.

Thanks for asking, sfexpat2000 :hi: You got me to think about how, exactly, the values got carried along, for more than 40 years now.

edited for typos