*****
It was 1964, 1965 -- the "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California, Berkeley.
Long ago -- surrounded by the swirls of Berkeley radicalism -- this writer found the seeds of independent journalism amidst the deafening rhetoric piped out to enraptured crowds.
The lesson I learned:
Do not trust the rhetoric of establishment professors; do not believe the rantings of power seeking radicals, do not let the authoritarian posturing of any kind of ideologue kill the quest for learning.
Rely instead on direct investigation, talking with people of all backgrounds and belief.
Establishments both Left and Right can be cacoons which block out the sunlight and justify the most horrendous atrocities. They can exploit emotion and rhetoric to draw the crowd into a vise of predictable orthodoxy.
And so there was an abysmal slide toward idiocy.
Berkeley's staid Establishment apologized for the savagery of America's war in Vietnam.
While the screaming Left, as it did with Stalin's totalitarianism of the 1930's, surrendered any consistent concern for human rights.
It championed civil rights in the American South, but portrayed the brutality of China's Communism with its millions of death as "paradise on earth."
Idiocy and ignorance triumphed at one of the world's great universities.
There lies a lesson for today.
