The Girl Just Wants to Be Left Alone With Marx and Engels for a While

by jean at 10:30 PM on June 24, 2005

It is strange how sensitive people are about politics today. I wonder if it was always so. When I was growing up, what the people around me worried about was the politics in their home countries. There was war in Honduras, Colombia, and Guatemala. There was corruption in Mexico. Taiwan was under military rule. But what was going on in America? My only contact with its mood came from network television.

Third-world immigrants have an understanding of politics that is very different from that of Americans. In their experience, political activism results in physical threat to oneself or one's family. Jailing, torture, and assassination are real possibilities. Aid organizations here find it hard to help immigrants, because they don't answer the door or the phone, won't fill out surveys, and won't talk to police, social workers, or government officials. In other countries, doing any of these things puts a big target on you. This compulsion for secrecy is a hard one to erase.

After I finished college, I slowly realized how far I'd drifted from the immigrant world. I watched Washington Week and listened to NPR. I knew what was showing at the Music Center. Today the people I associate are busy watching CNN and Michael Moore movies, and don't hide in the back of the house when strangers with clipboards knock on their doors. This is the America I know now, or perhaps actually these are the Americans I know now. They are sensitive about politics.

I already have a reading list for a class I will be taking in the fall. I only had one of the required readings, so I went to Barnes and Noble for the other two. They're unusual titles, the kind that a big bookstore keeps but sells only a few of each year. Heck if I knew where they kept them. I asked a store clerk to look them up in the computer for me. I asked for the Marx-Engels Reader and Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and I wondered if anyone within earshot thought that I must have been a total pinko.