MARX a couple hundred years later. For children everywhere
Including my own.A few years ago (2012) I was far away from home while my eldest daughter was beginning middle school; I reflected back on what I was learning about our planet in the 1980s during those formative years.
Back then in the early Reagan years, when the Cold War was hot, I happened to have a great junior high school teacher named Mr. Courtney. He taught us extensively about Russia, or the USSR in those days, of which he had studied in college: he knew and breathed their history, had graduated with a degree in the enemy's background. It was as if a human in Star Trek had become a subject matter expert about the Klingons. Fascinating, Captain. He was marvelous; our notes were copied assiduously from his handwritten chalk on the front classroom blackboards at this lower level mini-universe at Binford Middle School, Bloomington, Indiana. Middle America, the West's heartland. Those lessons and words took a magic quality as he recounted the birth of Bolshevism and Communism under Lenin and later Stalin, evolving from the tragic legacy of Tsarism and global expansion from Mother Russia. Curious and cold giant with its beautiful yet deadly ways. Us versus Them, as Pink Floyd has narrated wisely.
We were patriotic but respectful, the enemy was real. Foreign, strange, and different yet smart and powerful and in many ways striving for the same greatness as the United States. The world was divided, and I was on the right side. We had food. We had money. We had freedom of the press. Capitalism worked, despite the inflation and unemployment and crime issues ... But this Cold War with the Soviets loomed over everything, even with hostages taken in Teheran or troubles in the West Bank, or OPEC making the pumps run costly ... Soviet troops were advancing everywhere, like Afghanistan. Their missiles and our missiles made the great Dr. Seuss puzzle us with the Butter Battle Book. It mirrored the horror and awful truth of our planet in perpetual schism.
It was real. These guys, originally authors and economists and then demagogues and dictators had affected our lives with East-West enmity and the the subsequent threat of nuclear devastation, something all of us became nightmarishly aware of. While many grown-ups may have relaxed under the adage of Mutually Assured Destruction, I had plotted my escape from school to bike home and hole up in our little-used basement when the missiles destroyed our civilization.
I had comic books, no electricity required. And we had food storage down there to boot.
Fast forward to the 1990s: I had a Bachelor's degree and some would consider me educated. I had lived abroad, learned a different tongue, culture. Formally yes, I had become more aware. Internally I had my thoughts and biases. I heard some arguments in many fashions, I contemplated multiple view points. But Communists were bad. They were wrong. They got millions killed, and threatened the rest with starvation. Not just suppression on freedom. STARVATION.
So I was "Educated". I read things, I discussed things, like politics and history; I watched things and thought about things. I saw things, i.e. geo-politics, as an American, but also nuanced in that I had seen some poverty and knew people intimately that believed that socialism or communism would be the answer to bring the masses the goods and alleged freedoms that they deserved. Some world issues I was rolling over in my brain since the late 1970s when I was in third and fourth grade. But twenty years later things were taking better shape, the contours of the real world seemed to make more sense.
Poverty is not cool. It is not comfortable. It turns grown men and women into "less than", a human condition that most Americans resent. We, as human beings, homo sapiens, are "greater thans".
Fiodor Dostoyevsky knew this. I read Crime and Punishment in 1997. And all things started to become a bit more clear...
Russia. Great Mother Russia adopted Marx.
And so it went.
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