When I was in the warehouse I'd be in work early just to be with the guys, now I'm always late. Everybody's uptight, the bosses don't even trust one another, they go through the motions, but you can see it, there's less freedom and the atmosphere stinks. In a way I feel sorry for these poor slobs...I'm just bidding my time hoping and praying I can retire in another seven years, I sure hope so.

Looking back to my high school years I kick myself for not following my baseball career. I was pretty good, at sixteen I was playing semi pro-ball. I loved the game, but I missed the boat between working and running around with the wrong kids. I had no one to confide in, me coming from a poor family, we all had to work, and that was the important thing at the time.

When I retire all I want to do is fish, take in professional sports, and do a little travelling me and my wife enjoying life they way it was meant to be, together.

Another student, a father of five who works at Western Electric, wrote of a buddy who turned against his former co-workers after he'd been promoted to supervisor. The student had taken him aside to say, "Look Jerry, you're just hurting yourself, you're acting like an asshole," and for his trouble was reported to the office for insubordination.

We'd go for beers after class. Frank's paratroop outfit had been awakened one night in 1958, herded onto planes, and flown over Berlin. "They were going to throw us to the Russian invasion as a token resistance."

"My God, Frank! What did it feel like circling Berlin just knowing that?"

"I'll tell you," he said, screwing his eyebrows hilariously and puckering his lips as we emptied the pitcher. "I cried. All I could think was, 'Poor me, Poor me!"' He nodded his head slowly as I mimicked him, eyeball to eyeball.

"Half the guys on the plane were crying. And, man, when they told us we were turning back, everybody started throwing up. I mean, we were so happy!"

And so were we. But could I tell Frank I'd been a Conscientious Objector?

* * *

In class I spoke about the alienation of work under capitalism, and its perpetuation through excessive consumption and addictions and anti-social escapes. I explained how we export the worst of the exploitation to foreign workers, citing what happens in Puerto Rico and Taiwan (and, in the past, Shanghai, Havana, and Saigon). I described Latin American peasants who get a few cents a day growing coffee, yet have to buy their wheat from us; we keep governments in power there which force them to plant only coffee, so we can get it cheaply and control the wheat market. I spoke of guerrillas who want to overthrow those governments and our corporate influence, and showed how, if they succeed, the corporations will squeeze workers tighter here at home. "Either they put you in uniform and send you off to prop up dictatorships, or they take it out on your hide back here. Profit's the goal, not your wellbeing; the two don't go together as well as we've been told."

The men got angry, some of them at me. "If you're going to pull down the American flag, do it gently, mister," growled one, "'cause some of the men who died for it were my buddies."

I caught my breath audibly. "Look, a lot of things I say in here were painful for me to discover. I never had your experiences, but it's partly the things you've all been telling me that have led me to share what I honestly think, based on my own limited experience and reading. It isn't easy for me to say I think we're in for hard times, and that a lot of those men who died for the flag have been 'had'."

"Jimmy," a guy called from the back, "I want to ask you something. You study these things, right? Okay. Do you think about this stuff twenty-four hours a day? I mean, why do you do it?"

I wanted badly to answer but didn't know how. "Sure, I guess I think about society a lot. Our backgrounds were different. It's a bad analogy, but when I was in high school and we went out for Phys Ed, I saw from the way some of the guys could handle the ball that they did it all the time, on their own. I guess when we went back inside to Social Studies, and I made comments there, some of the guys must've felt the same about me. I had different things encouraged in me; I had some advantages because though my father started poor, and worked his ass off, he wound up employing people--well, people like you. I'm still learning where that got me, and what the price was. It's sort of like, we have to know how and why we've become so different."