The system has forced people to think that they live in Hell because they deserve no better. You are poor because you are dumb and uncreative and your breath smells.

I went into a gray-haired woman's apartment that had an inch-wide crack running across the ceiling. I tried to tell her that with rent control, she could force the landlord to abide by the housing code, She could make him fix the crack.

"No," she said, "everywhere I go I have cracks in my ceiling. It's not the landlord's fault, it's mine. Somehow leaky ceilings are part of my life."

Jesus, I thought. You mean that this woman has lived 60-odd years thinking that her presence in rooms causes the ceilings to leak?

I grabbed her by the hand and took her next door to her neighbors, where, of course, she had never been. In this atomistic society, you are crammed into your own room and told not to visit your neighbor. When the neighbors answered, we went inside and looked at their ceiling. The crack continued all the way across their room too.

"You see." I said, "it isn't your crack, it's the landlord's crack. You didn't cause it, he did. He let your apartment deteriorate. He's only interested in taking your money."

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 become a professor.

"Dick," he said, "you don't want to be 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 to fix things and work with his hands to stay alive. 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 no-where left to walk if you refuse to climb their ladder.

We are left with the freedom to invent ourselves, because there is little left in this society worth imitating. But by rejecting the pre-programmed lives that the kindergarten-through-college channeling system provides, we also have the necessity of creating our own lives. The ones that have been planned for us have already been lived, and there is no sense for us to follow their futile path, carrying our cog's worth of American culture to the scrap heap. In exchange for having to live through some of the greatest horrors the world has ever seen, we are left to our creativity to find our own left to our creativity to find our own direction.

The Vietnamese, for example, are different. Their condition, the material necessity of their lives, requires that they fight the American occupying army. They accept that necessity as valid-that necessity gives meaning to their lives.