ABSTRACT

Most young people discover aspects of their lives that connect them with social problems of one kind or another. Most are part of families and social groups whose historical experience provides them with initial frames for interpreting their relationship to those problems. The social problems of which the author became aware as a child were diverse. He certainly had no sense of an underlying social or political or economic structure that they might all reflect. The threat of nuclear annihilation was a shared experience of author's generation. His personal relation to the Holocaust and to anti-Semitism resulted from the fact that part of his family was Jewish. His experience of McCarthyism as a personal threat was due to his parent's political views and associations. His experience of race was determined by the fact that under the US caste system he was inescapably defined as a white person. His despair led him in quest of solutions based on common preservation.