She signed the rent control petition and thanked me and went back into her room. For all I know she may think that "her" rooms never have electrical outlets because she lives in them. I am really frightened to think how many people live in this country thinking that all of their troubles are their own fault.

THE FATHER of a friend of mine is the vice-mayor of the little town I live in outside of San Diego. He sells washing machines, refrigerators and stoves. We were eating dinner one night about five years ago, and I told him that I thought I wanted to be a professor.

"Dick," he said. "you don't want to become a teacher. You've got too much life in you for that. We go through a special routine when teachers walk into the store. You have to make them feel secure. Teachers are afraid of life. They're afraid to step up to the plate and take a crack at it."

He had started with a little hardware store and was now one of the most influential men in the city. I suppose he's in the ruling class. But he spent his life putting his head and his hands together. He learned what he had to make it. if he didn't he'd go under. He could have been destroyed by the tooth and claw of petty bourgeois competition. Instead, he saw only one way up and he followed it.

Like most of our parents, the ugliness of the success vanished before the necessity of obtaining it. He struggled because he would have starved if he hadn't.

I can almost envy that necessity as I sit here with a dozen books scattered over my desk, a sales slip marking the first or second or fourth page of each of them.

America imposes the model of a life in which you are supposed to struggle to the top. Society then imposes collective moral sanctions against anyone who does not accept the hysteria. But if you don't accept the model, you are lost as well as hated. You are not so much ostracized as left to find your own way. There's nowhere left to walk if you refuse to climb their ladder.

We are left with the freedom, but also the necessity of inventing ourselves. Instead of finding meaning in our lives, we must first find a direction. The Vietnamese, for example, are different. Their condition presents them with the necessity of fighting American aggression. They accept that necessity as valid and meaningful. They can therefore find meaning in the lives they are forced to lead. From them, we will have to learn.