Dragonwriter (28 page)

ONE OF MY
earliest memories of family life with my mother was a time when we were gathered around the television watching
The Wizard of Oz.
Mom loved it as much as we did, and I've lost count of the number of times we watched it together. I'm reminded of this because of the Tin Man and what the Wizard told him about the heart he longed to possess: “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” By this measure there is no limit to my mother's heart.

I'm so proud that my mother led her life in such a manner as to have earned the admiration of so many, and it is altogether fitting that she be remembered in written tributes, including many gathered in these pages. As her eldest son, the privilege of writing and delivering her eulogy was given to me. She deserved nothing less than my very best effort, and that is what I confidently delivered that fair day in November. Yet as important as it was for me to rise to the occasion, I've come to realize since that the most fitting tribute I can pay Anne McCaffrey is the manner in which I lead my life, while honoring, through use, the many gifts I received from and through her. I've been a progressive activist my whole adult life in large part because of her influence. And never for a moment did I fail to enjoy her full support for my efforts. Let me elaborate.

Like many of my mother's admirers, I'm a big fan of Dragonriders of Pern. The courage, resolve, and dedication of the dragonriders inspired more than admiration. They inspired emulation, and I'm sure this had an influence on my future activism. I was also impressed by the example of Lessa's strength and wisdom, along with that of the many other strong women who sprung from my mother's remarkable imagination. The world I hoped to live in embraced strong people regardless of gender. My feminism, like the rest of my activism, has deep roots.

When I first read
Dragonflight
many years ago, I'm sure I never thought I'd find parallels between Pern and life on Earth, but today I do. When F'lar first saw the Red Star rising in the sky, he fully understood the threat it signified—an existential threat to all life on Pern. Here on Earth there is no Red Star rising to warn us about the tremendous danger we're beginning to face. Global warming
¹
is real, happening now, and every bit as much a threat, this century, as Thread falling through Pern's skies in the world of my mother's imagining. And here on Earth, just as on Pern, there are many who refuse to recognize the threat, choosing to ignore it at their peril. Unlike Pern, however, humanity here is beset by the largest corporate players on Earth, the fossil fuel industry
²
that works its colossal betrayal through many of the largest governments on Earth. It's almost more than a bronze rider can cope with. Almost.

I was a teenager when I first read
Dragonflight,
and like many I longed to be a dragonrider myself. I recall asking Mom what kind of a rider she imagined I was, and she told me I rode a brown dragon. Knowing that the biggest dragons ridden by men were bronze, I requested and received an upgrade. And more than once during a demonstration or a direct action I've wished I could summon such a giant friend. Yet I recall reading somewhere that in China's distant past the dragon symbolized the people in their power. And a dragon of this kind I've witnessed many times, first when I was sixteen.

It was 1968, and I had traveled to Washington, DC, to participate in what remains the largest political demonstration I've ever witnessed, an anti-Vietnam war rally that reportedly had somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 people attending. I recall stepping off from the Lincoln Memorial walking toward the Washington Monument. The path before me was filled with people all the way to the monument. When I arrived at it, I turned to see where I had come through, and the entire space had filled again with people. I'd never seen so many people in one place before in my life. It was an experience both electric and awesome. And while this went far toward propelling me on the path I've been on ever since, the real turning point came the following year and had much to do with Anne McCaffrey.

In the 1960s we lived on the North Shore of Long Island, and I attended North Shore High School in Glenwood Landing, New York; drawing on the local accent, many students referred to it as “Nausea High.” In my senior year the school district was horrified when heroin was found on our high school campus. Our district was lily-white and quite middle to upper-middle class economically. Many regarded heroin as something that only happened in dangerous places like New York City, and a good deal of panic ensued. The school board invited students to share our concerns about this unexpected problem. What we delivered to the school board was equally unexpected, surprising them and the entire school district. And it wouldn't have happened without Anne McCaffrey's help.

Before I continue with this story, it's important to recall the context we were contending with at the time and the profound influence it had on my generation. It was the end of the '60s, and many of us were steeped in the youth counterculture. The Vietnam War cast a very long shadow over my entire experience in high school. From the time I was fifteen, high school felt like a conveyor belt that was going to deliver me to an early grave in a distant jungle. Every week the news relayed the body counts of our troop losses and estimated “enemy” casualties as if it were some kind of macabre sporting event. And then there was the civil rights movement. I had grown up being assured that I lived in the greatest nation on Earth, especially loved by God because we were the “home of the brave and the land of the free.” Watching pictures of African-American school children being fire-hosed by white southern sheriffs sorted poorly with this gilded view. I was inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I admired the bravery of the Freedom Riders, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers. And I wasn't alone. A whole cadre of students at Nausea High shared my views, and together we responded to the school board's request for comment on the heroin crisis with more than a dozen pages of political and cultural critique that ranged far beyond the crisis in question to the larger issue of the strange and alienating world we were asked to take our place in. This document came to be known as the “Green Manifesto” (GM).

Although I was not one of the authors of that document, I can certainly lay claim to being one of its publishers and a most ardent distributor throughout the school district. More than forty years have transpired since the GM was published, and I cannot remember precisely what its pages contained. I'm sure it included much about the war, concerns about civil rights, and many concerns widely shared by the counterculture we all identified with. The reference to “green” had nothing to do with environmental considerations and everything to do with the fact that the paper it was printed on was green. Ten thousand copies were printed and distributed throughout the district, and it was a tremendous experience for all the students involved, all the more so when we beheld the collective jaw-dropping reaction of the school board and the firestorm of concern it inspired among parents in the district. It was an extraordinary introduction to the power of activism and democracy in action. It set my feet firmly on the path of a lifetime of activism (some of which I'll share presently). And the fact that it was printed at all was because I was the son of Anne McCaffrey.

The reason we were able to produce and distribute so many copies of the GM was because of a fringe benefit Anne McCaffrey enjoyed as secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA). Mom printed their newsletter and somewhere along the line had acquired a Gestetner mimeograph machine for that purpose. We were overjoyed and more than a bit surprised when Mom not only agreed to help us print the GM but also proceeded to buy many cartons of green paper for the purpose. I can't remember how many days it took us to print and collate all those copies, but it was a labor of love, the fruits of which just got better and better.

In hindsight, my mother's support for our activism wasn't all that surprising. She always encouraged the young adults in her life, whether they were her offspring or not. Wherever we lived, our house quickly became a sanctuary for teens, who flowered in the environment my mother created so naturally. I should mention that she wasn't that great with very young children, and my early years were a trial for us both, but from the time I was about fourteen, and for the rest of my life, I could always confide in her, trust her, and be confident in her belief in me. And I never doubted her love was absolute and unconditional, a gift I enjoy even now that she's passed away.

During this period when I was trying to make sense of my world, pondering so many contradictions between the myth of America and the reality I found increasingly impossible to ignore, I encountered a quote from Bertrand Russell where he declared, “I would rather be mad with the truth than sane with lies.” This had a tremendous impact on me and has probably done more to shape my life than any other English sentence I ever encountered. And it was through many conversations with my confidant/mother that I came to make that declaration my own.

The Vietnam War was a test, not only for my generation and myself, but for my family. Anne McCaffrey was the proud daughter of a career military man, Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey. Her views about service were heavily shaped by him and by the experience of having both him and her eldest brother, Hugh “Mac” McCaffrey, serve in and survive World War II. At first she regarded the draft for Vietnam as being no different than the similar call that brought her relatives to war in 1942. My father always supported my desire not to serve in Vietnam, and in fairly short order, my mother came to see that the war was a “bright, shining lie.” In 1970 she had moved to Ireland, where draft evasion wasn't a crime and therefore not an extraditable offense, and so my short-lived exile began there in 1971. Early in 1972, the draft lottery I was subject to happened; I “won” the lottery, which meant my selective service status was changed and I was no longer subject to U.S. military service.

I remained in Ireland for several years and had a number of adventures. I was a trawling fisherman, and later a rabbit-hunter on the Great Blasket Island, the southwesternmost part of Ireland. I finally wound up working for the Simon Communities in Belfast—an organization that served as a “safety net” for all those who fell through Britain's existing social safety net—where I got to witness civil war firsthand, even surviving a bomb blast that exploded across the street from the shelter I worked in. Employment opportunities were scarce, however, for an alien resident living in the very impoverished Republic of Ireland in the '70s, and by 1973,1 had returned to the States.

That was the year of the first OPEC oil embargo, and I got to live through the rest of the '70s, a period marked by a lackluster economy that resulted in large measure from that oil price shock. I was able to make the best of it and during that period served as the last business manager of
Liberation Magazine
and went on to found the 100 Flowers Bookstore Coop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was also the residential director of a halfway house for ex-mental patients, drawing on my earlier experience in Belfast. All the while, my mother's career was developing, and it went ballistic with
The White Dragon.

It was shortly after
The White Dragon
hit number six on the
New York Times
Bestseller List that Anne McCaffrey gave me a tremendous gift: a second chance at college. In 1970 I had enrolled in SUNY
³
Stony Brook, but that was the year after my parents had divorced, and I wasn't in the right frame of mind for academics. By the late '70s I was more than ready, and as Mom's success began to translate into significant financial gains, she made me an offer. I could either spend a year traveling around Europe, all expenses paid, or I could go back to college. For me it was a no-brainer, and I quickly matriculated into the University of Massachusetts, where I majored in economics.

The UMass Economics Department was unusual, and its distinctiveness was why I chose to go there. I studied traditional neoclassical theory, but I also studied its progressive critique. Prepared as I now was to risk becoming “mad with the truth,” I was able to shed many unhelpful myths about the true nature of the United States, imperialism, and the global economy. Mindful of what a tremendous gift my mother had given me, I became a devoted student and graduated cum laude (almost magna cum laude), was invited to submit a senior honors thesis, and earned a departmental distinction.

Despite my dedication to higher learning, I continued with my activism. At UMass I helped form a progressive student organization that was able to unseat the reactionary and somewhat racist status quo in the student assembly. In my junior year, activists on campus became outraged when UMass refused to grant tenure to a pair of African-American faculty members, chiefly, as near as we could tell, because their field was African-American studies. We revived a tactic not seen in a decade and occupied the administration building, refusing to leave until we were all arrested. Our acquittal on all charges was a pleasant surprise, but the crowning moment, and one I had to share with my mother, was when we were all invited to a Baptist Church in South Boston to be honored for our sacrifice. During this ceremony we received letters thanking us for our devotion to the struggle for equal rights. When I visited my mom for Christmas later that year in Ireland, I presented her with that letter, as there was no one else on Earth who deserved it more.