Heretic's heart Book

This autobiography recreates the 1960’s easily and clearly for those who either weren’t alive during the time or didn’t participate in the various counter-culture movements. It is a very appropriate book to read right now as it provides much-needed perspectives on how and why movements occurred during the 1960s. It cleared up some of my questions and helped me to see beyond some of the media-reported excesses to the heart and intentions of people, both then and now.

The book is created from letters and journals kept by Margot Adler and her family, which she says:
“. . . do confirm what I best remember. For all the limitations of my generation – our unconscious actions, our unexamined ideas, our often silly phrases – we were alive to the deepest spiritual values. We believed that exploration was lifelong, that one’s life work had to be honorable, creative and transformative. We seldom thought about consumption, or the eventual need to live the good life . . . We believed that nothing was fixed either in human nature or in society, and so we experimented endlessly.
“We had a multitude of failures and successes. To echo the words of Ms. Frizzle, the science teacher in the wonderful series of children’s books and TV shows: ‘We took chances. We got messy. We looked for connections.’”
While she initially talks about her family and childhood experiences, the focus of the book is her activism during the 1960’s civil rights movements. She begins with the Free Speech Movement at Berkley. It surprised me to read how conservative the faculty at Berkley was when she arrived in 1964. She and other students fought the system at the time in order to have free speech on a college campus. I was stunned. I thought college campuses had always had free speech, so this was a complete surprise to me that students had initially organized, protested, and used passive resistance techniques simply to be able to speak the truth in their on-campus newspapers and other venues.

She also relates how winning that right fueled a tremendous amount of optimism that direct action could change the world. It kept them energized to participate in the other struggles for civil rights over the next several years.

Adler helped me realize the tremendous heroism of black people (and some white people) who fight oppression and she writes about her realization of privilege – she can return to her (safe) white world at any time, take breaks, not think about race, and experience security at any time she needs to. She traveled to Mississippi in order to register black voters and realized:
“[T]these people are heroes. They have no security to begin with, and once they step out into the struggle, what little security they have is gone. I really don’t know where I would stand if I was a Negro sharecropper and stood to lose my life, or my job if I just signed a piece of paper asking for better drainage, a bit of pavement and some street lights.”
And yet there is a lot of hope to:
“There is singing outside the freedom house. Those freedom songs have something almost mystical about them. They make you light up with happiness no matter what you are feeling.”
She writes extensively about feminism, and shares examples from the 1970s that show, even though we’ve made some very visible gains, there are many ways in which women’s space is not our own. One passage in particular struck me:
“Everyone sat in a circle and spoke in turn, perhaps for ten minutes. There were to be no interruptions. This simple idea was revolutionary because in the seventies, whether sitting in a restaurant or reading a newspaper on a park bench, women were seldom left alone. They were almost always interrupted, even accosted by strangers.”
Yup, still true today.

One of the most absorbing sections of the book is her lengthy correspondence with a soldier in Vietnam. I could quote so much of that as he is very thoughtful and reflective, but I recommend people read her book and find out what he was thinking. What is so compelling is to have such close correspondence between a protestor and a soldier fighting in the war that is being protested. My guess is that did not happen a lot, or if it started (say, between family members) it probably ended in anger or frustration. They both seem equally intrigued by what the other is experiencing, which is really fascinating. They do meet eventually, but I won’t give away what happens.

As we all know, she becomes a journalist, and I think these skills are what enable her to write so well in this book about her ambivalence and contradictory points of view in relation to social theories. She agrees with parts of ideas, disagrees with other parts, and changes her mind as she gains different pieces of information, meets people with new perspectives, and participates in life.

Ultimately, her journey is a spiritual journey, and she acknowledges the value of that deep spiritual connection:
“The world of the Old Left had great truths, but its principal failing was that it could not bridge these divisions. It was too afraid of the irrational and its pull, and it did not really understand the human need for the juice and mystery of ecstatic experience; it did not realize that one can enter the flow of the mysterious, the non-ordinary reality known to all artists, poets, and indigenous peoples without losing one’s intellectual integrity; that one can dance round a bonfire until dawn and still make one’s living as a scientist or a computer programmer; that one can work to end poverty and exploitation but still embrace song and dance and dream. Like shamans of old, we can attempt to maintain our balance as we walk in different worlds.

"In my own life, I still begin each project with the question, What can I do to turn the world upside down, to question assumptions, to undermine received wisdom?”