ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about author's awareness of social movements as a means through which people can respond jointly to problems they cannot solve as individuals. He witnessed people, by virtue of their participation in social movements, identify problems, construct new solutions, cross social barriers, coordinate their activity with other people in new ways, and change the world and their relationship to it. It was still the Cold War era. The Socialists, the Communists, and the other shattered remnants of the old left appeared doctrinaire, sectarian, and minuscule. He was already struggling to understand what he later came to call common preservation. Growing out of his personal awareness of the threat of nuclear war and his family's social concerns, he made contact with and became active in the peace movement that was just emerging to challenge the nuclear arms race. He became part of the vast hinterland of support that the civil rights movement drew on for its nation-transforming confrontations.
