Health Problems In Broad Perspective

[RonPrice]

SPIRALLING

 

I could have been involved in the mainstream of the politics of the Left beginning at a crucial moment when, briefly, it appeared that a new social order might emerge from the student unrest in the mid 1960s. I was involved early, in 1964, with the Civil Rights movement in America, but my involvement was short. By 1966 I was at teachers college and by the student rebellion in 1968 in France I was recuperating in a mental hospital outside Toronto from a bad episode of manic-depression. Many intellectuals who were at the barricades in the 1960s spent the following years preoccupied with understanding why and how all that social and political energy and promise seemed to have turned to nothing. As a Baha’i, the energy and expectations I held in the 1960s proved in some respects quite unrealistic, seemed to go nowhere. Hoped for results “did not readily materialize” and “a measure of discouragement frequently set in.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Haifa, 2001, p.101.

 

Our experience, it seemed,

looking back on those early years,

offered few answers.

Indeed, that was often the case

given the immense complexity

of our times, our years, our days,

the urgent and interlocking

challenges which:1

broke my health,

destroyed my marriage,

sent me spiralling

around the world

from Eskimos to Aboriginals,

teaching in every conceivable

setting and wearing me out.

 

1 Century of Light, p.102.

 

Ron Price

June 3 2004