So, now I am back at college. Something weird happens to me. I just didn't want to be there at all. It seems like the Israel experience affected me in ways I can't explain, then or now. I became anti social. This is not me. I didn't even want to leave my room. I just couldn't relate to any of it at all. Finally my two best friends came and dragged me out of my room. Then I guess I integrated back in.
That year was especially eventful for me, and life changing! I guess it started when I attended a talk in my dorm by a radical, political science professor. She was young, about 30, but that seemed old to me, since I was only 19. She had started a commune and lived with her students and other young radical people. She was a bit of a controversy at the college, and eventually got fired. She was into Woman's Lib, which I had been a little exposed to by one of my two friends in Israel. I don't remember the talk all that well, but I know it presented me with ideas that rang true to me, that I never really heard before. I do remember one line she said that changed my life at the time. "If we are all one,you are only as free as the most oppressed person on the earth."
I don't remember how things progressed exactly, but somehow I became involved with this this woman and her group of friends. I started getting into the Woman's Liberation ideals and learning about the Revolution. Where I lived in upstate New York was very close to Attica, New York where they had had the famous Attica Uprising in the prison there a few years before. One of our friends was actually an Attica indictee. I embraced ideals against the bourgeoisie and privileged class. It all was in opposition to me being in college. In truth I saw college as a complete waste of time. All I could see was a bunch of rich kids partying and taking drugs, not really caring actually about what they were studying. The classes were lukewarm at best, as well as the teachers. What I was learning from my new group of friends was alive, vital and real.
I might mention that most of my new friends were not going to college. Some were quite a bit older than me. More in their mid to upper twenties. Not only that, but there was a camaraderie and feeling of love between them that I hadn't felt since my experience at summer camp. They lived in houses off campus, and had lives other than going to school. I had lived such a sheltered life, I never knew anything but living at home and then go to college. I never even knew what lay beyond that, or about how you lived beyond a college dorm. I am telling you, I was a naive as they come. I never heard of renting a place. I didn't even know how you did get to live somewhere but your parent's house or a college dorm.
Well anyway, I started feeling like I didn't want to be in college anymore. I had no real goal for the future. I thought it was a boring, dead, waste of time and my father's money. I was way more excited about my new life and friends and radical ideals. I tried talking to my father about it. Of course he didn't understand. He was an immigrant child of Orthodox Jews from the old country with the American dream of your child going to college and becoming a professional. And the world he lived in, every body's kid was in college. We had a big talk about what is my major. He want me to be an accountant of course, but maybe I should be a teacher. He said it was a good profession for a woman.
I did sign up for a teaching course the next term. I only lasted a few weeks. The book was from the 1950's and so behind the times, I just dropped the class.
I was feeling more and more, like I didn't want to be in college. I was ready to drop out. My main problem is that I didn't know how a person lived outside a dorm room. No one had ever prepared me for real life. Then one day, very close to the end of the school year, a friend of mine, who was in college, but part of the more radical group told me that she and 3 other girls were going to rent a house, off campus and needed another roommate. The rent would be $35.00 a month, and would I want to do it. I said yes. Then I knew here was my chance to get out of college. I guess I went down some office and told them I was dropping out. they did put me in some category, that I could come back if I wanted to. I had dropped out of college.
copyright 2010 © Stacey Bander. Please contact for any reuse.
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