I had some very close friends, who just happened to be black. She wanted a sponsor so she could get her real estate license so I sponsored her. She worked out of her home but used my office. It would have been very risky for her to try to work out of my office in Davie. She was also a teacher. He was a cop and his job was community relations for the police force. It was a position that was very important and needed and knowing him I'm sure he had a positive impact on a lot of people. But race relations were generally getting worse. My friend was considered an "uncle Tom" by some blacks. Black nationalism was on the rise and it was the time of Malcolm X. They owned apartments also and my friend was also shot dead by one of his black tenants.

It was a strange time, a difficult time and America was very fragmented. There was the usual disparity between rich and poor but the despair index seems to be higher because the times were revolutionary and people were demanding their civil rights. During that period we saw both Kennedys shot and Martin Luther King. These were the upheavals of the late 60s and the 70s. And in this new century I feel that same kind of tension where we may be approaching the threshold of more social upheaval.

As much as the Bush administration tells us we are doing better, we're not. Social programs are being gutted. Veterans are giving up their limbs and coming home to find their benefits cut.

In the late 60s, I published a newspaper, called Am Yisroel. It started as a small paper for Jewish ham operators for a network I established on 20 meters between Jews worldwide, which included subscribers in Israel, mostly kibbutzniks, and the newspaper gradually developed into a publication with a world-wide circulation of about 1,400, not just for Jews, but for progressives everywhere, who supported Israel, but not on any biblical grounds. We were determined that no other Holocaust should happen again and not just the Jews.

The truth is I didn't know much about anything. I knew there was something wrong with the world and it involved me. I hated racism. I hated antisemitism. But I was still apolitical about the war in Vietnam until I read an article in a Philadelphia newspaper (which is no longer publishing) and it explained the war and it included details of the Soldier's Trials, the one that Kerry was involved in. My involvement with the Vietnam war was mostly from the "war room" at the Pentagon and those few trips I took, but I was never in combat and my information about that war was limited up until that time. Then I met a judge in Miami (Pred) at a pro-Israel function and he was in the ACLU and was one of the leaders in the civil rights movement. We became close friends and I joined the ACLU in the early 70s.

After the Vietnam War, and that period of national retrospection, those of us who were active in the peace movement saw the end of the war but not any real change in attitudes. Rather it was a period of division and maybe the nexus of a division that even exists to this day. I remember as a veteran the rallies and speech given by John Kerry earlier which said so much about the awful carnage and then the Pentagon Papers which really woke up something in the national psychie. How could we be so wrong and so bad? All the illusions about America were gone.

I started attending demonstrations and I took my son, Johnny. I remember the cops calling us "dirty communists" and other less flattering names. I becamse a vocal anti-war activist and the radio network I started reflected that position. Eventually it becamse an internet forum, but that was much later.

Simon Weisenthal was a subscriber to Am Yisroel then and were several anti-war activists in Israel. The publication was selected to be in the Jewish Archives in Washington, D.C. but eventually, I ran out of money for the paper and could no longer afford to publish it in hard copy. However, the paper and radio network was a catylist for "fellowship" groups, Chaverim, which were formed all over the country on ham radio and they continue to this day.

Eventually pnews became a forum on Prodigy and the FidoNets and later it was picked up by the APC networks and Peacenet. That is how it had its beginnings over 30 years ago on ham radio. Today it is a forum called PNEWS-list using Mailman software (Subscribe and follow links at pnews.org)

We had chickens, goats and rabbits and we lived off the land. I read Henry David Thoreau's journals from cover to cover and I wrote my first play there which was performed years later by the Raleigh Ensemble Players in Raleigh, NC. It was wonderful time for us in the Berkshires. I miss it.

It was also very cold in New England and the ground would freeze over with permafrost during the Winter. I wore layered clothing and double socks for my long walks in the woods. Once my feet hurt so bad from the cold but I remember thinking that as long as there was pain I knew I was alive. We had a beaver pond not far from the house and I would go there often and read. Sometimes I would see deer which had been shot by hunters and they would take the trophy and leave the meat. What a waste when so many people were going hungry.