VLVL2: Pisks Privileged?

[Terrance]

davemarc wrote:
> 
> Just wondering: Does anyone besides jbor and Terrance think that the Pisks
> are from privileged backgrounds? If so, on what basis?


What do you mean by  "privileged"? I'm not gonna speak for Rob here, but
I never said the Pisks were the daughters of the Capitalist Class.  My
recollection of this thread is that it was, for the most part, not a
very constructive or productive one. I won't attribute this anything in
particular, but I think that one of the wrenches in the works was
language and terminology. I don't much care for terms like "Middle
Class," "Privileged," "children of the surfing class," so on, but I do
remember agreeing with some of your more insightful arguments (ethnic
and cultural characteristics, NYC/California, although I didn't agree
with the significance you attributed to the "act of naming"). 

Violence, the social scientists have determined, has been a hallmark of
twentieth-century America, and it has been a formative preoccupation
with those who grew up during the period marked by Auschwitz, Hiroshima,
Southern terrorism, Vietnam, assassinations, urban rebellions, police
riots, and governmental repression. Kenneth Keniston found that his
Vietnam Summer Interviewees were immersed in violence from earliest
childhood: "In the lives of these young radicals, as in much of their
generation, the threats of inner and outer violence are fused, each
exciting the other" to the point where " the issue of violence is to
this generation what the issue of sex was to the Victorian world";
another survey of SDSers in 1966 found a "special way in which they have
experienced violence, both directly and vicariously" and determined that
" this special and intense preoccupation seems to be a necessary element
in comprehending the predominance of violent dystopian futures
[projected in essays] among SDS youth." 
But *origninated* violence characterized none of the early activities;
they were all victims. Hayden, Potter, and others beaten in the South,
Gritlin, Gizzard, Booth, and countless others jailed for civil rights
demonstrations, ERAPers harassed and arrested by local police and
vigilantes, antiwar marches beaten and gassed, students at Berkeley, in
several Black schools, and elsewhere clubbed, kicked, shot at, and
arrested by police. Even with the rise of resistance, in the previous
fall offensive violence was characteristic only of the Sopt The Drat
Week and Rusk demonstrations, and then limited to minor property damage
and bottle throwing; the students at the Pentagon, at Wisconsin,
Indiana, Brooklyn, Oberlin, San Jose State, and the rest were initially
victims of police charges, Mace, and tear gas. 

But resistance taught certain lessons ... Out of resistance, then, there
grew an understanding of power, an appreciation of the values of
confrontation, and thence a willingness to initiate violence. 

Sale, SDS

BTW, UHURU may be pacifist on paper or in Australia or Africa (I don't
know), but in the USA they have been involved in violent confrontations
with police and others for decades. A quick glance in the New York,
California, Florida newspapers,  proves that my statement is true. In
fact, UHURU was very active in NYC during the Guiliani mayorship and 
recently organized a protest march after a boy was murdered by a police
officer here a few weeks ago. But don't take my word for it. Check the
Berkeley Library or any big US library or the NY Times Archives. 

Peace out, 

T