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It's not the space, it's the trauma

Julia Pfleging | 21.03.2003 20:24

Margaret Drabble sent out a query whether it was the space that made us nuts, here's the beginning of an answer

For some reason, absolutely beyond me, you brits with your truly excellent and until recently accessible education system do not address the utter defeat of American Culture during the great depression. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1980 with a good degree from the University of Texas I was treated as an Oakie, it was a bizarre but effectively traumatic introduction to the city of love (Pish Posh, as Dickens would have me say). We lost it all then. Our men were hearded into armies and when they returned the women and children lived and died with the trauma they had brought home. I only know Korea, imagine WWII was much worse. I also know Vietnam; I know why the young of the U.S. took to the road according to their means. Movement without loosing sight we began then, the best of our young continue this great tradition of our culture. Every tract neighborhood here is riddled with the paths the children make, the warriors, they’re soon diverted or drugged, but by then the paths, the knowledge has been passed on. Is it the same way in Britan, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Orkeys say what? Time to make alliances, respectful of territory earned by blood & increasingly one’s immune system.

Julia Pfleging