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Scott, I use Vietnam as more than a symbol in one sense, but as shorthand in another. It goes beyond being just "a symptom" in its relationship to people's lives when you stop & think that every male in the U.S. spent the better part of a decade trying to keep their government from personally killing them. (I was drafted in January of '65, for example, and spent the next six years explaining why I wasn't going.) So it was really internalized very differently than a lot of other symptoms by straight white working-class males like myself. It was the one period in my lifetime in which no intellectual leap was necessary at all to comprehend the nature of oppression. There was nothing abstract about it. I can still tell you to the digit what my selective service number was even though I haven't been draft eligible since I was "released" from my alternate service obligation in January '73. My situation was not the slightest bit exceptional in this regard. Second, I was in fact just using it as shorthand and am conscious of all the many ways in which the industrial revolution having driven the peasants (my ancestors) off the land has changed everything. I tend to date "the sixties" in my own head from the anti-HUAC riots in San Francisco in 1960, since I knew people who were active in that (and one of my high school teachers lost his job as a result of HUAC indiscriminately publishing a list of people they "wanted to talk to," including volunteers at KPFA, the Pacifica network station). But as Michael and Robby Meeropol, the sons of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, would be happy to remind me, it didn't start there either.... Ron ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%