You Are Now a Cadre
The determination of the teenage acolyte is unmatched
After my sixteenth birthday in 1974, politics was all that mattered. The Red Tide was by its nature, a fast-aging set— what were we all going to do when we got out of the high school playpen?
Several of us joined the “grown-up” socialist group we were most attracted to at the time, a very small sect called the International Socialists, the “I.S.”
Why them? In some ways, it was chance— there were a lot of left groups in the Vietnam War era who salivated at the idea of recruiting a bunch of fearless teenagers who never slept. The I.S. was attractive because they weren’t doctrinaire about many things the rest of the New Left was hysterical about. They were in favor of independent feminist groups, gay organizing, black power, whatever— you didn’t seem to have to choose between causes. You just brought your class consciousness to every potluck and that was easy enough to do.
They also— and this spoke directly to ou…