What I wish I'd known before- meandering thoughts about mom

Growing up as I did in a lackadaisicaly Left household, I was exposed to a number of ideas which I wish had been presented in a form other than the glancing conversational. By the time I was three, I was familiar with boycotting, overthrowing and Nixon-as-liar. I knew a few names (Debbs, Teamster, Mao (oy!), Lenin and Marx.) My mother was a reformist, member of the SDS, and seller of the Little Red Book (did she ever read it? I don't know for sure) to raise funds (irony o'irony).

By the time I was 6, I knew first hand that I did not like the FBI. My uncle, you see, had been involved with a group which had done a bombing (late 60's) of a power supply plant or something. No one was injured, but the Wisconsin police were cracking down and my uncle, being still underage, was - though not actually present at the bombing, nor actually involved in the action- fingered by the group who figured that he'd get off easy and that their sentences would be reduced for naming the name. Nice.

Well, what actually happened was that they decided to prosecute him as an adult, so he went on the run. For years we didn't know where he was. The FBI followed us from state to state, followed my mother to work, and likely have a couple of good photos of me at montessori school. I vaguely remember biting an officer who came to the house.

All of this, combined with our cutting our Mexican Vacation short when Allende fell, scared my mom out of being very vocal about politics other than the boycotting (Nestle in particular, and Libby's). She will talk about who she hates in politics, but it has devolved into a weird belief that the Democrats offer any alternative, and that there is an "evil" in the White House. I don't think living in New Age Marin helped any of us, but she has taken a lot of the claptrap to heart. I still love her.

What this all adds up to is this for me: Years of intellectual wandering. I knew what "seemed right", and I knew how to spot a blatant lie. It's a start, to be sure. But what I wish I'd had was a grounding in Marx and Trotsky. I wish that boxes and boxes of books had not been left behind when we left Wisconsin. Even though I know a lot of the SDS (and their tactics in particular) is a load of hooey, historically speaking, I want those boxes back.

There are days when I think about writing a Trotsky For Tots book- even if it were never published, at least my own child would have a head start. Lenin for the Little ones. The problem I see is that these concepts deserve to not be juvenalised- indeed, they need to not be. It's a quandry. How do you communicate these things to a kid? I know there are Bible Stories for Kids, but I tend to classify them with the fairy tale genre.

There's a series of books which Boy likes- about seasons, robots, and science (I read them to him, and he likes the pictures), so I know that even a two-year-old want to know about the world around him. It's not hopeless, it's just tricky.