62
DOTSON RADER
and not those who oppose it? It's a class thing that kills, Lindsay's
bourgeois class . . ."
In the fall, I went with a Columbia friend of mine, Tom Seligson,
on a trip across America to interview high school radicals for a book
he was writing. The first student we interviewed lived in Scarsdale, New
York.
Once a nearly exclusively WASP community, Scarsdale's primarily
Jewish population is growing rapidly. The public life of the com–
munity is centered in the schools and the country clubs (one for Pro–
testants, one for Catholics, one for Russian Jews, one for German Jews).
The boy we talked to was a sophomore in high school. He had a police
record, having been arrested live times on various charges growing out
of protests in the New York area.
"It's like your life's already a rote, like they expect you to share
their values, 'think independent, Benny, think like we do' . . . like liv–
ing in Scarsdale and making money
means
something.
"You get Bar Mitzvahed, not because you
believe
in the religion,
so who believes in it? not myoId man, because it's
expected.
You're
supposed to go to the college, because it's expected. No one considers
that maybe you don't want the college, maybe you want something other
than the Big Apple. After the college you're expected to become some–
thing big, something important, a cake-eater, making lots of money.
Something respectable. So your old man can die happy.
Happy!
Like
I should see
him
happy once in his life ,just
once
I should see him come
home and look happy, say something,
anything,
happy! He doesn't like
this
life, or this country. It's all gone bad on him, it means nothing.
Just the children, done it all for the children, and now we got to do
the same crud for
him,
live in the same prison. It doesn't fit.
"Now my parents they try to justify the pattern, the high grades,
the being good at athletics, dating popular girls, they justify it because
it will 'open doors,' doors I don't want to enter. What's so terrible
about the South Bronx? He lived there when he was my age. You can
be happy in the South Bronx, without the grades. Kill yourself to avoid
the South Bronx, for what? Scarsdale?
"I was talking about the pattern all the parents here justify, push
on their children. Like when I was in fifth grade,
fifth grade!,
I was
worrying about what college would accept me, knowing my parents
could never live down the shame if I went to a state school or a
second-rate college. Like it was for them I was living, worrying, al–
ready
all
the time worrying. In fifth grade.
"Now
we
are rejecting things and, funny, we're rejecting them be-
