Forty years ago

May 5, 2010: Forty years ago today, I was 13 years old, and I was in the ninth grade at the Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia. I was a strange, intense young person, trying to figure out how to adapt to my maturing female body in a world in which it felt that a woman could not be an independent human being. It was becoming clear that despite my hopes and my tomboyish behavior, I could not become a man, and I could not bear the thought of being a woman.

Unlike most of my classmates -- who held regular protests in support of ending the Vietnam War, I thought that the United States government was defending democracy and freedom in South Vietnam. I was the only person in the school assembly who would stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem. This was my first effort at political activism. From where I stand today, the position I took was dead wrong. But I respect the 13-year-old who was willing to defy her peers to do what she thought was right.

Forty years ago this morning, I woke up to the radio news that National Guardsmen had shot and killed demonstrating college students at Kent State University the day before. I had never heard of Kent State University, and at first I thought they said it was Penn State University. At first, I was horrified. But the radio made it sound as if the soldiers had been frightened of the student protesters and were only defending themselves. I believed that explanation, although forty years later, it sounds ridiculous. To believe otherwise, I would have to believe that my government was engaged in repressing freedom rather than defending it.

This is a complicated story that I don't have room to tell in a blog post, but eventually, I worked my way around to an understanding that my government does exactly that. That it most often works to defend oppression -- patriarchy, racism, unlimited bloodthirsty capitalism -- rather than freedom. I stand against everything that the "tea party" movement stands for -- but I have the uncomfortable awareness that I don't trust my government any more than the tea-partiers do.

Less than two weeks after the shootings at Kent State, city and state police in Jackson, Miss. killed two students and wounded 12. At the time, these murders received less attention than those at Kent State, because the victims at Jackson State were black instead of white.

So here I am, 40 years later, a radical feminist, caught somewhere between socialism and left-wing anarchism, still not knowing how to help to create the egalitarian society that I insist on believing is possible. One thing that started me down this road was coming to understand that my government had lied to me about why we were fighting in Vietnam. I believed my government, and I supported my government when everyone around me said it was doing wrong, and then it turned out that my government was lying to me. I think that would be enough to make a radical out of almost anyone. But the other thing that started me on the path to being who I am now was that one day that spring, on a bulletin board in the halls of Masterman, I discovered a mimeographed flyer about women's liberation. From which I derived the outrageous idea that I could be a woman and a human being at the same time. I haven't been the same ever since.

Have a great day, y'all, and happy Cinco de Mayo.