March 16, 2018:
It's likely I'm the only student who ever spoke with that custodian. I think he was invisible to the others.
He seemed shocked the first time I said hello. I have no retrospective clue of any sort how my study of the Vietnam war came up in convo. When it did he confided his imprisonment for draft resistance. For a half a heartbeat I was shocked: I'd never knowingly met a real criminal before. Criminal of conscience, in this case.
He introduced me to the movement. Churches, primarily. The Peace Churches: Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The left wing of the Catholic world: the Catholic Worker movement, the Liberation Theology movement. Students secondarily, including a handful from UCSD who became one of my roads into the student movements there.
I spent less and less time at school. Even less than previously, I mean. Now instead of playing wargames at home or smoking dope in the canyons I was cranking-out leaflets on a mimeograph machine or helping to draft statements we hoped would be amplified by the press. My high school itself was dead. Apart from the Moratorium in 1969 I have no recollection of any antiwar actions on campus at all. Probably there were plenty but I was absent too often to have encountered them.
There were some individuals who stood out. Beautiful Cynthia shining with golden light was a principled pacifist. I wasn't ready yet. I remember being highly dubious when she said firmly that even if attacked by someone intent on murder she would not use violence to defend herself. I hadn't yet read Fire in the Lake and hadn't yet befriended that custodian, so that I had no context for statements like that.
As ever my core commitment was to democracy. I remained then as I remain today a true believer in truth, justice, and the American Way. All of us on the Left, the true Left, the principled Left: we're all true believers in what they taught us in grammar school. What I learned first from Frances Fitzgerald and later from the activists was that our democracy was systematically subverted by leaders who lied. We trusted them, we believed they were ours. But they lied, and they led us into a horrific war of genocide against an entire people.
I was not yet "politicized". I lacked any systemic analysis. The link between capitalism and elite misrule which seems so patently obvious through today's eyes was not yet even hinted at. That came later, through much intellectual toil beginning at UCSD, concluding at Johnston. Right now I was simply in awe of Cynthia and the other religious pacifists. Especially that draft-resisting custodian who'd gone to prison rather than war.