BACKGROUND TO GENESIS (written 2023)
At the start of winter quarter, 1969, I realized I had completed all my required courses at Stanford for my honors political science major, including my honors thesis on the De Gaulle and the Algerian War, as well as all other required courses. I only needed three units to graduate. I had applied to law schools including a combined business/law program at Stanford. Everything seemed set and clear for the next phase of my life.
But that summer I had some challenging experiences. I was taking two classes, one on trial law and one on religious studies. In one I learned of Buber’s I-Thou as a way to treat people in their wholeness and fullness and in the other I learned about the adversarial approach of law’s I –It. Also over the summer I went to San Francisco to Glide Church, met Rev. Cecil Williams, and had some experiences which exposed me for the first time in my life to a poverty and unfairness that shocked me, making me face the privileged life I had been living. I had never before seen such living conditions.