I was born into a family that was already well formed when I arrived. Four brothers, close in age and interests, when I arrived in 1933, eight years after the youngest. Apparently a surprise Looking back to my years as a I kid means looking back to a family that was life in someone else’s world. First was the Depression which was well underway when I was born, in 1933. But I did not come into that world alone. As my dad noted, more than once, I came in with Hitler and Roosevelt. I had four older brothers who ha, the youngest in . close in age and with common interwstsin intereststheyset th became a reality for me when, starting in 1942, they all- which mostly means my years in the Jefferson School - K-8 - my memories are often of a tough effort to fit into a tough world, a world at war. someone else’s world. That was no different from home, but school was bigger. In retrospect the teachers saw us as groups, probably much more than we realized. And obviously too young to know that this was by design. But for how we saw ourselves and each others, we had to figure that out. It was a challenge. But such an odd one because I ended up in a number of involving and rewarding situations where I also did not fit in. For me, being an outsider while also living a life - at least as a teenager-that was largely of my own making was tolerable. It allowed me to do things such as going into the Met to stand-in-line for their $2.00 standing-room tickets actually had a sense of adventure to it. The line itself was an offbeat, interesting-and safe -adventure.

One personal reality that began during these early years, that I remember with clear and strong images, has been a sense of compassion for the kids around me who were visibly unhappy. To my eyes there were always a lot of them. Which is obviously a commentary on the world in which I lived. I was able to fake it. They weren’t. They wore it, and some so openly, that what I saw there was a strength of character that I found surprising. I should add that these were the postwar years during which refugees mostly from Eastern Europe were arriving in numbers.

But whatever the causes of their sorrow I felt sorry for them. I knew it was wrong that it ran so deep that they couldn’t leave it behind. This view ran deep in me. So whatever our local approval agents, or groups, and their reasons I did not trust them. . And whatever moral and monitoring groups in my school worlds - often after first trying to con their approval -I became an outsider to them.

About twenty years ago, when I first went to Eastern Europe, I wrote a memoi,r “The Story of an Accidental Outsider.” I wrote much of it in Vilnius. Looking back at it I am surprised that it seemed accidental. I have been an outsider because of my choices for work and for friends, and especially for the people and groups I decided to have nothing to do with. And never having had even one hour of formal religious education as a kid American life also plays a big role in channeling us unasked into its own groups.

I see myself as a writer. A view that I lodged in me about fifty years ago when I decided that I wanted to write a publishable page, which is 250 words, every other day. the description ‘publishable page” meant one that I considered worthy of working on with an eye to publishing.

- se the David O’Rourke writes about the role of dominant social groups and their collectively agreed on moral languages to establish and maintain codes of public conduct that serve their own public eminence. From the American slave states to the Soviet mines in Magadan he has described the common uses of agreed on languages and codes to justify coerced labor of groups defined into groups with lesser human standing.   He co-wrote and produced the documentary film Red Terror on the Amber Coast, describing the KGB repression during the Soviet’s fifty-year occupation of the Baltic Republics following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  And from New York Newsday to the San Jose Mercury News; from Commonweal to the Catholic News Service, over the course of more than forty years he has described Americans’ commonly successful resistances to changing the repressions built into their public language. 

I write for myself. And I write for the pleasure of looking back into the life of usually unanticipated adventures that came along with the choices that young men make. Early in my teenage years, looking around me, I know I started deciding where I did not want to be for long. Most of it had to do with places run by other people and with rules taken for granted as how things were. This did not involve rebellions, just the sense that I’m not going to be here very long. Fortunately, my years in a good university equipped me to start thinking about where I did want to be. Much of this was about the living and working context where my life would be worthwhile in my own eyes.

Early on I chose to separate myself from my roots. Early on I learned they were not trustworthy. But separating is not the right word. More accurately I discovered that, with some smart or diplomatic maneuvering, I had alternatives. My family, looking back, actually presented me with a variety of alternatives as I moved into my teenage years. And, in effect, I came up with my own. I was the youngest by far, arriving unannounced and unneeded into a clan that could have continued to do well without me. Not being needed for any personal or family business, but still being decently subsidized, was a reality that many young men have hoped for I suspect, but to no avail. So my stories here record how I managed to head off rather widely on my own at a time when my generation was probably one of the most privileged in the country’s history.

What I write here is a look back at these worlds and how humanly rich they were. Humanly rich and just plain rich, or at least in the parts where I landed. What they had in common was my choice for vocal roles as an outsider. Voices for change within the institutions on whose periphery I lived, but close enough to benefit from their support . From small town New Jersey, to Yale, to a few years in Provence and Paris to twenty years in Berkeley and towns on very privileged edge of San Francisco Bay was like some kind of extraordinary gift that seems to have allowed me to face and take real risks without calling my wanderings to a halt.

More recently my writing has shifted into how the very process of valuing our lives is built on our own socially invented and self-serving language of value and consent. So these essays - and that is what they really are, a journalist’s essays - sometimes are backwards looks and sometimes a current attempt to figure out something that for whatever reason I see to be in need of personal figuring out. And part of the figuring-out ends up looking into the language in which it is understood, because my serious writing now is about that language, the social rhetoric we lean on to protect ourselves from being challenged by our own, very-needed self-questioning.