Young Americans

BRIAN: Well Joanne, Ed, we’re talking about youth getting involved in politics. A lot of social protest and kind of curious to hear when you came of age politically and whether you ever protested anything?

JOANNE: Well, I actually have a really distinct memory of that. And that’s because it was my first semester at college, but it was 1980 and Reagan was on a helicopter tour around California during that presidential campaign. And he came to my college, and they actually said in our classes– because it was a big deal, that we could skip class if we wanted to to go and see this rally.

So I went to this rally with no expectation of any kind. I had never seen anything like that, I don’t even think I’d been tuned in ever on the news to anything like this. And I actually looked it up before today’s conversation so that I would know I was accurate. There were several thousand people.

BRIAN: Nothing like being there, Joanne.

JOANNE: I know. Well, you’ll see what I do remember about it. I don’t remember how many people were there, but apparently there were several thousand. And there were several hundred of them were actually heckling Reagan. And I do remember he lost his cool and yelled at us, “You kids,” sort of a moment that I remember thinking, “Wow, I didn’t expect to see that.” But the thing that struck me and that stayed with me was that before he came on stage to speak, there was like a warm up bands, like singers. And they were singing Christian songs, they were singing Jesus songs. And I’m Jewish, and I stood in the audience and I felt like I had just been told to go away. I felt like suddenly I was not– although no one did anything, but it was like wow, I was just exclusively cut off from this. They didn’t include me.

BRIAN: And was this a Christian college, perchance?

JOANNE: No. Nope. No, no. It was not. It was Pomona College, one of the Claremont colleges.

BRIAN: Did that translate into anything, Joanne? Did you take that sensibility and join Hillel?

JOANNE: It did not transfer, I think, into a Jewish sensibility explicitly. It did transfer into a I’m more involved in this political process than I knew I was before, you know? Like I was with a group of students, they were engaged in one way or another, they were either cheering or heckling, and then I was sort of like thrown in the middle of it because I couldn’t avoid it because it felt like a personal statement. So suddenly, it was like I gained a political awareness that I honestly don’t think I’d had before that moment.

BRIAN: Joanne, I’m going to go ahead and just share my political coming of age, and Ed can attest to this. This was not rehearsed in advance. It also has to do with being Jewish. And I grew up in South Florida where Jews were, of course, a minority, but a strong presence in the community. And I was shipped away to a fancy prep school in New England. And I had never been particularly religious, but we were required to go to, quote, “church.”

And Jewish kids on Sunday would attend, quote, “synagogue” in the basement underneath the church. And I started feeling resentful, and that really fed my Jewish identity. It’s probably the only three years of my life where I really strongly identified– not just religiously and culturally with being Jewish, but politically. And here is my first political act.

I played French horn, and I played in the brass quintet at the school. And of course, we’d be called on to play at the real church upstairs. And my first political act, something that the historian Robin Kelley would label “in for politics.” My first poetical act is intentionally playing out of tune during those church services. There it is.

ED: I hope the Statue of limitations is up.

BRIAN: I hope so. I hope so. Now many would say, “Brian, I heard your French horn playing. You always played out of tune.” But I did that very intentionally. I went on to do a lot of other political things. But I was thinking about this, and that really was my first explicit political act.

JOANNE: How old were you, Brian, when that happened?

BRIAN: I think I was 16 when I went there, and I probably didn’t have the courage to do that until I was about 17-years-old, something in the vicinity. Ed, we haven’t heard from you.

ED: Well, that’s because they heard from me a lot back in the 60s when I was in high school.

JOANNE: Wow, what a segway.

ED: Yeah, but it’s also just complete bluster because I’m in East Tennessee, which is not really a hotbed of student protest. But I had watched television throughout my adolescence. And you got the clear sense I felt a part of my generation, you know, a feeling that our job is to be a part of a counterculture. And I lived and breathed in music. But I decided that a more efficacious way to protest would actually to be write op eds for a local newspaper.

BRIAN: Wow. Did you know this about him, Joanne?

JOANNE: I knew nothing about this.

BRIAN: I didn’t either.

ED: Well, I was a columnist for a short while for the “Bristol Herald Courier” when I was a junior in high school, and therefore 16-years-old. So I wrote two articles that I remember, both of which really got me in trouble pretty quickly. One, I wondered if the local Christian churches were doing all that they could to reach out to young people.

BRIAN: So, 3 for 3 with religion.

ED: It’s interesting, isn’t it?

BRIAN: Yes.

ED: But I was writing sort of from within the tradition and saying when there’s so much going on in our culture, churches to fulfill their Christian purpose needed to be more engaged. People were not happy with this, including my parents because it was seen as an attack on established religion. So the next article that I wrote was– and I’m still kind of embarrassed by it, an attack, actually a parody of the two guidance counselors at our school. One male, one female. And the point was that you kind of had a bad choice. You could either get somebody who was either going to give you kind of blandly reassuring and maybe religious message, and somebody else who’s going to kind of make fun of you, right?

And so I portrayed the kind of dilemma of the high school kids–

BRIAN: The Hobson’s choice.

ED: Exactly. A solvent sentral, right? And kind of gently made fun of them. But what gave it a real edge was a cartoon was produced that portrayed the woman as an angel and the man as a bear. And these poor people are sitting there doing their jobs. And there’s a cartoon in the local newspaper in front of all these adults. And these people have never done anything to me, but it was like what could I do to be kind of cheeky? What could I do to be kind of countercultural in my very narrow world?

And the only pieces of the establishment that I could see were Sunday School and the guidance counsels, right? So I was hardly radical, but you think about things that in retrospect seemed pretty high risk for a 16-year-old kid to be out doing, or stupid would be another way of putting it.

BRIAN: Well, except– Joanne, I want you to be the judge here. But I have a theory which is that by the time Ed and I were in college, my guess is Ed was involved in protests. I actually don’t know. I was involved in lots of protests, primarily against the Vietnam War. And I and the thousands of people with me, we were arguing against the establishment. We thought that we were unconventional. We were taking a chance. But in fact, I was doing exactly what all of my friends were doing. And it’s not that I didn’t believe in those causes, but when I think back on it, it was the norm. It was the easy thing to do.

I think of the kids who were in Young Americans for Freedom. They were conservative, they were Republican. I can’t remember any of their names, specifically, I literally remember faces. And in retrospect, those kids, right or wrong politically, were the courageous ones. They were the ones at a fancy university college, like the kind that all three of us went to. They were the ones that were actually pushing against the grain. I will say, I’ve remained very involved in politics, but I’ve grown a great deal I hope in empathy for people who feel passionately differently than I do and developed a real curiosity about why it is they feel that way.

JOANNE: So Brian, what you’re kind of saying it sounds to me, is that empathy is kind of a counterforce to disillusionment when it comes to protest. That even when you’re disillusioned, you come away with something from protest. And that matter, that being empathetic with others in the world is something powerful.

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