Professor Noam Chomsky,
I have written you many times before — birthday wishes, letters of thanks, and many questions which you have provided many insightful answers to over the years. Last year, during a brief stint at Popular Resistance, my introduction to the readership was in the form of a birthday wish to you — an-all-too-brief personal account of what you have done for me, and how your work has made this world a better place. It was a sentimental and, for what it’s worth, honest piece. I look back on that piece now as a marker of progress in my growth as a writer. I would like to, again, send my letter of thanks to you — and I would like to also, make a promise to you, Professor.
The last time we met, I was in a state of personal confusion. As we know, it is impossible to organize — even for something as tremendously simple as Universal Healthcare — in an affluent suburb. The appointment that I made to see you back in the summertime was fueled by the hope that some answer could be provided that would unlock the secret to raising the consciousness of my community.
I remember sitting in your office, laughing at myself, and comically dismissing that dismal feeling — the all-consuming despair we are always having to resist. I remember that, in effect, what you told me — this has made me smile to look back on — was that the choice really is between these episodes of all-consuming despair and complacency, conformity and surrender. You shrugged and told me “It’s that or a quiet life,” before I was summoned out of your office by an apologetic Bev Stohl — Noam is a very busy man, after all, sorry Stephen! Ah, well, until next time, my friend.
And I have learned a great deal from that humorous remark. I have made my choice, and I do not feel despair any longer — I will do all I can, however I can, to make this world a better place. I have wanted for a long time to tell you my story, and reveal to you the role you have played in my life. I will make it as brief as I can, without sacrificing any of what I am trying to say.
When I was 18, I was kicked out of my house. My parents were, in a sense, the Kafkaesque portrait of the American suburban family. My mother teaches at a private school, which was opened in the 1960’s in Maryland. During the time of integration, this school was opened as a whites-only private school — ironically, I suppose, one could think of it as an act of adversarial resistance to the change of the times. My father is a white-collar worker and works pretty high-up in the complex. He is a Controller — deciding who gets paid how much, and what will get the company as much money as possible. I was adopted at 3 months old, from South Korea, as was my sister. My sister, in some sense, is the embodiment of our idea of the conventional American Dream — she was a cheerleader and a track star and on the honor role in school — and she has gotten married very young. She teaches Spanish in a public school, I think.
I have not spoken to any of my immediate family in about four years. The relationship between me and my family was always an interesting struggle. As a child I would annoy them with my incessant asking of questions about the world, and religion and why the grass was green and the sky was blue, and what Heaven was like when we died, and on and on. In my teenage years, I upset my parents constantly, as the hyper-curiosity evolved to become total defiance of my school work. The fights would become physical, and many times my parents would bitterly threaten to send me to boarding school, or bootcamp — threats that, at the time I was too ignorant to understand the implications of, and therefore I did not care. I would have rather them leave me alone than scream at me about school work that I did not care about, because I simply could not understand it and because no amount of fighting would ever motivate me to complete these stupid assignments.
When I was kicked out of my house, I was a scared child. For the first three years I felt it was my fault, and I was weighed down by constant guilt. I was raised in an upper-middle class house, and I began to cycle between friends’ houses, because, job or no job, college degree or no college degree, they understood that I just needed food and sleep. This kindness was not always the case. You can imagine what that means, and whatever you have in mind, it’s probably going to sting a little more than that. But that became my life, and so it was.
As I was able to save up money and rent rooms out from other families, I began to learn something that really made me grateful for the house I lived in growing up — regardless of how terribly my parents treated me. When I first rented out rooms from very poor single mothers who lived in horrendous conditions — my naive self learned very quickly. Sometimes, those invisible houses were only a few miles from the house I grew up in. I had also seen the sadness and anguish of two of my best friends live through a divorce — they were 32 and 34. I was 19, and it was very hard for me to process at the time. I would steal alcohol from their cabinet, and drink and weep on the bathroom floor. And the more houses I stayed at, the more I saw — parents who were like my parents to their kids, or domestic violence with all of its variations — emotional abuse from the single mom’s boyfriend, or physical abuse of the children, or numerous shades of alcoholic violence, and so on.
It became very hard to ever get a good night’s sleep.
During the day, however, I would read at the library — It was the only peace I ever found. I had never truly read much, and until I was about eighteen, I might as well have been dead. But the library was where I was born, so to speak. I was deeply moved by a work the Dalai Lama had written. I can remember feeling drawn to removing the book from the shelf, pushed gently by mere intuition. The truth of what he said about happiness and compassion rang true to me, and brought me to life in a way that I never knew a book could. Reading sustained my life — and when I did not read, I was content to simply have the guitar with me. I had only a few changes of clothes, and that’s what life was for me. So that was my life, too.
During all of this time, running from house-to-house, and reading at the library, I came across your work, and Howard Zinn’s work. I had the time to read both your work, Manufacturing Consent, and Howard’s, A People’s History of the United States. His work made me weep, for the things specifically we had done in Vietnam, and how he chose to end his book, by pointing out that our system was the most complicated series of oppressive programs ever produced — television, the school system, the military, the journalist establishments, and so on. I was deeply inspired by Manufacturing Consent.
You and I made contact on the night of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination — I lied in my letter to you, and told you I was a student at the University of Maryland, thinking to myself that this detail might increase my chances of receiving a response. To my surprise and euphoric delight, I received a response! It was very detailed, and as usual, insightful. A few months later we met in person — first, in passing, as I shook your hand at the second lecture you gave at the University of Maryland, and then a week later, at your office at MIT for the first time. It was a cold January Day, and I had taken the bus up to meet you. My reservations for the Hostel I planned to stay at for the night before fell through. I found that CVS was open twenty-four hours, so I opened a magazine and pretended to read it. I managed to get two hours of sleep. Meeting you the following morning inspired me to research much more about what was going on with Occupy, and to learn about Anarchism, and to continue reading and learning from each house that would open its doors for me.
Part of the cycle of the next three years — the cycle of homelessness, and reading, and making visits to the University of Maryland to steal books, and visiting protests, and meeting other activists — that cycle included scheduling a visit to see you at your office — to talk about Healthcare, or the Obama Administration, or your childhood friend who I met at the first of your two lectures at UMD. Her daughter and I are good friends as a result of meeting there. She is now in her early fifties. Her mother still remembers you fondly — she always tells her daughter to tell me to say Hello to you when I visit.
Later we would talk about the activist Margaret Flowers, and how tactics were only parts of larger movements, how Ron Paul was — I’ll never forget how funny it was to me, when you called him “batshit crazy.” And conversations with you are always like that — disarmingly genuine, and free of any condemnatory poison. The most meaningful of our interactions, though, is one I have saved in a file on this e-mail account. The story of that exchange begins at the point in my life where I had found out that the word for a self-taught person was “autodidact.” It had been revealed to me in a book written by the French author Muriel Barbery, called The Elegance of the Hedgehog — and I heard the word pronounced in a lecture of yours I watched on the Internet. You were describing scenes from a book by Jonathan Rose, called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
I e-mailed you asking you of your thoughts on the possibility that an autodidact intellectual might find a way to establish himself in our society. I had just had my confidence destroyed because I had been rejected by the University of Maryland. Pathetically having no one else to confide in, I wrote to you alone from the bedroom of a very messy house. Your response is something I will not ever let myself forget — that some of the smartest people you have known were self-taught, and that largely, you would consider your political education a result of self-teaching and wandering around the library.
That assurance has given me enough confidence to run to Baltimore and meet with Margaret Flowers, to reach out and contact the famous peace activist, Cindy Sheehan — who has since become my friend, and who has asked me to write on her website — to write for anarchist newspapers in Baltimore, and submit letters to the newspaper in my hometown. It also gave me the confidence to challenge myself with the most difficult and rewarding reading of my life — not the anarchists that are laying on the coffee table in front of me right now — Kropotkin, Voltarinne De Clerye, some of your works — but the great thinkers Wittgenstein, and, yes, Marx — and later, the beautiful work of the charming genius and cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter, and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, and the economist Ha-Joon Chang and others.
Currently, I am living in a co-operative that is run by students in College Park. The co-operative also allows people who are not students of the University to live in their houses. I knew that somehow, one day, I would find myself here. These people are my friends, and they regard me not as a fool but as a teacher to them. This has been a validation to me — an affirmation that this work is not meaningless — and that I have not wasted my time all of these years.
And, of course, there are things that no reading can teach. On one occasion, a kind and exhausted single mother told me that her two nine-year-old sons would have to wait until the next evening to eat — there was no food in the house. I had remembered the passion and anger of your work, and Howard Zinn’s, and it was what orbited my mind the first time I ever took action — the first time I ever would have called myself an anarchist. I had no money, and I asked my friend to drive me to Safeway — he left, and I entered the store, stole two rotisserie chickens, and left. I made it back to the house by dark, slammed dinner on the table, and went upstairs to return to reading. That, I hope you will not find to be an immoral action. I regard it as the story of my radicalization. The day when I understood the true meaning of the word anarchist.
I have written shorter letters of gratitude before. But this one is crafted with delicate care. I have often wanted to take my time to write this one to you. But I have already waited for a long time, intentionally. I did not think I was a good enough writer. But, things are different now. My friends here have given me the confidence to dedicate my time to writing. Still, it takes a while. An additional obstacle: it is hard to write anything at all if you are grappling with the difficult task of forgiving yourself for your mistakes — lies, stealing, lies, guilt about my home life growing up, relationships that have ended — people who have left my life that I loved and hurt without meaning to.
But I am now almost twenty-three. My birthday is December 23rd, and I am in a good place, doing good work, and finding myself at peace, writing with ease. Now, I believe in myself, and though I do not believe in anything superstitious, or any form of deity, or ecclesiastical tyrant, I absolutely mean it when I say that God has kept me safe all of these years (A Christian Pantheist, and liberation theologian who taught me over these years, and sat with me for hours over coffee to teach me everything, he knows of my visits and letters to you. He is a brilliant philosopher and something of a personal mentor. We teach each other now, as equals and friends.). Perhaps, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris — they are right in some ways, but they are or were insensitive and cruel, and they never have or never did conjure up answers to questions I would have (or have indeed) asked them about Paul Tillich or Spinoza’s pantheism, or liberation theology, or Christian Anarchism, or Unitarian Universalism, or Hans Kung…. Perhaps it is the simple vanity that they will not face — that for all of celebration of the glorious vastness of human knowledge, there are things that humans will never understand.
I want to say to you, that whether Jesus existed literally or not, the Bible points out that even He despaired before finally dying on the Cross (My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?). That is to say, that in that moment, even the Son of God lost faith in what He was fighting for. However, we know that whatever happened following this event, one thing is certain: the world continued, and that humankind has shown that Love still survives. For all of the reasons to worry and despair about the possibility that civilization will collapse, there is the feeling, perhaps, irrational (but that detail is irrelevant) – that humanity will survive. I am young though, but even so I want to promise you that I have no fear, even of a 21st Century Dark Age, because there will always be the ones who have the willpower to stay alive, and to keep the ones they love alive with them — either in their memories, or here on Earth.
Soon, though, I do plan to move to Canada (maybe) — not in permanent exile, but because, I suspect that the Canadian Press will not worry so much about the consequences of publishing the story of an American Anarchist. Many intellectuals and novelists have chosen emigration. Victor Hugo, Spinoza, Nabokov. So for me, someone who is simply trying to find his own way — I am not ashamed of the idea. And I want to promise you, that in some way, I will keep your work alive in whatever work I do.
Thank you, for everything, and know that I consider you not just a mentor and teacher to me but most importantly, a friend.
Oh, and, Happy Birthday.