Responsibilities as an Elder

In my junior year of high school Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I changed from a good liberal, ethnic white democrat to a radical socialist within months. Socialism is an ideology that believes in the potential of all persons of all ages and fights for the social conditions that will let that potential blossom. Liberalism, including liberal or “bourgeois” feminism, affirms much of capitalist, patriarchal relations- including boss and worker, landlord and tenant, and parent and child.

I would have preferred to just add feminism to my liberalism. However, in NYC for college, I did not find the mainstream women’s movement welcoming. I was young and ready for action, but I was marginalized as “a kid” and not encouraged to participate in actions like the Ladies Home Journal sit-in. But like generations before and after, my youth was used by the movement.

When NY legalized abortion that same year, 1970, 3 years before Roe v. Wade, girls were coming in from all over the country for abortions. Girls came in from Midwest cities, towns, farms and reservations. Many called the NY Women’s Liberation Center en-route or when they arrived. They were directed to the Women’s Health and Abortion Project. We met them at the bus stations- helped them get services-and then returned them safely to the bus station for their trip back home. These were funded advocate positions- my first NYC job.

I was happy to have a meaningful job but my feeling, which I made known, was if I had saved my 4H egg money to come to NYC, on a bus, by myself, for an abortion, I would prefer meeting my Grandma when I alighted the bus not some Hippie Chick but No Aunties or Grandmas volunteered. The older women were the bosses and the funders. Youth were the foot soldiers. Several advocates did the job as a paid internship, then left to continue graduate school as a nurse practitioner or midwife. This has remained the model- young people do the service and/or organizing work for a few years then return to school for credentialing. Policy and management input comes after credentialing.

Socialists were more open toward young people. I had some experience trying to get older activists to join our organization as it moved to the east coast. The ” old” left that I met were not largely impressed by the New Left but their criticisms were not that I was too young to have a serious debate nor that I should return to college; they were political and generational. They decried our adventurism and our arrogance toward their work and history. There was a more democratic attitude in this movement but it was a small movement. Formal inter-generational conversation was not widespread. Few, new, vital organizations had more than a token member from the Greatest Generation.

This was the political far left of the 1970’s. Socialists and communists were few in number, they had been dislodged from most mass movements, and young and old were in separate organizations with different political programs and priorities. Same today?- how do we avoid those unforced errors?