SATURDAY'S OPINION BY ROGER COHEN https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opinion/trump-germany.html
I sent a link to a Guardian piece to a few friends about FaceBook and how it manipulated past elections and is poised to do so again. It's somehow scarier because of perceived British reticence (yes I know about their tabloids). www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/with-facebook-we-are-already-through-the-looking-glassOne friend, with whom I have been close since we met in Logic at Hunter College (Mihi cura futuri), each of us occasionally toting our toddler sons to class because we never knew if classes would be held, answered my text saying, "I have too many things to be terrified about." Back to that in a minute.
The reason we never knew if classes were on is that it was height of "revolution" and administration buildings were being "occupied" on colleges across our land. Being in a midtown skyscraper--
well, a short one, 19 stories--made those kinds of seizures impossible. Not to be daunted, opponents of the war in Vietnam and the bland accepting of the middle class lifestyle decided to shut down academic life in a Manhattan way: they occupied the elevators. At nearby Columbia, we went and heard famous agitators agitate. It was an exciting time, a time when many of us felt that things could be different, fairer, better, and we were the ones who could do it. Meanwhile, we studied philosophy and literature in the interstices of life as a mother, good time gal and hippy--though I did no drugs.
All the time I heard those supposedly more connected that I talk revolution, intimating violence, and sometimes more than intimating, I thought, 'Do they know that means blood?' I was never anywhere that violence actually occurred, but I worried, and was grateful to the Beatles for their song stating my misgivings. That was 1968.
(to be continued)
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