A planned protest

March 18, 1985

 Anne says they'll put me in jail. So, does Michael Alexander. Who's to say they're wrong. But I don't care. I can't live my life fearing consequences or start bowing down now when I never have before. I keep hoping for a better world, one in which people operate by principle, yet I know better than to expect it.

 I hear news that William Paterson College is about to create a system of censorship at publications for which I once wrote, and I see red from rage.

 How can they? What gives them the right?

 So, I schedule my own private sit in on the campus to prove a point, scheduling it well enough in advance so that other people might join me, but other people keep calling me up to tell me I'm nuts.

 I suppose they're right.

 I expect the world to become a better place because people have worked so hard in the past to make it that way, yet the only change I see is slow deteriorating, cycle after cycle of people giving up, people swallowed up by habit and lack of change.

 Last night, Anne nearly went into a seizure, her jaw jerking around so much I thought we'd have to drive her to the hospital. It has something to do with her high cocaine use. She blamed me. She thinks I want to go to jail to get away from her.

 Now that's crazy!

 Yesterday, Michael Alexander called, trying to talk me out of my planned sit in.

 "You'll only get arrested," he said. "And it won't prove anything at all."

 I didn't argue the point much, except to say someone had to protest the change.

 "But it shouldn't be you," Michael said. "You don't go to school there anymore. They'll call you and outside agitator."

 I wanted to laugh. All my life I've lived by certain principles, values which were seen as outside the norm, values for which I was willing to give up my freedom to defend.

 In 1979, I lost two jobs over such things, one because my boss abused the woman in the computer room, and then later in the same year, because the union representative sold out to management. I did not back down then, I see no reason to back down now. If William Paterson College wants to create censorship, someone needs to speak out, even if it's only me, even if they put me in jail.