Pamela Jean Owens off-line

I was first introduced to computers in my senior year of high school, Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas. I graduated high school in 1966. As a young math whiz, I was part of an honors math class that learned so much Calculus that I placed into the third semester of Advanced Calculus as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, and during that semester I tutored the sophomore science and engineering students in the class with me. And we didn’t get to anything that was new to me until most of the way through the semester.

Our amazing math education was not just because we were young prodigies, although some said we were. More important than who we were had to be who our teacher was, Mrs. Lee Ellwood, a genius of a teacher who had taken every math course offered at S.M.U., undergrad and graduate, but wasn’t interested in writing a dissertation so they couldn’t give her a doctorate. But the math profs at S.M.U. were in awe of Mrs. Ellwood, so when they kept bombing out trying to teach Fortran, the new computer language that was so important in the early days of serious computer use, to their freshman Engineering students. They appealed to Mrs. Ellwood to figure out what they were doing wrong. The deal they offered her was that she would learn Fortran, which she was bound to do anyway, then she would bring us out to S.M.U. once a week for an evening class and teach us Fortran.

We learned Fortran, no problem, and we thought it was loads of fun. We punched our cards and wrote our programs and I have no idea at all what the programs did — probably less than you can do on your cell phone today. Certainly a lot less than I can do on my Palm Centro. But in college I used Fortran to write a program to do a factor analysis of some survey data that we gathered and used to write a methods paper. We wrote our program, punched our cards, analyzed the results, got the bugs out if our program didn’t run, and we wrote our papers. Once again, I can’t remember the research questions I asked the data to tell me, but I know it was something sociological, and that it was still fun!

At the same time I was learning computers, I was learning politics. I was moving from being a tacit yellow-dog, labor-oriented Democrat, born and raised and not asking many questions about why that was what I was. Yes, one of my earliest memories was as a little girl, going door-to-door for Adlai Stevenson in his second run against Eisenhower — that would have been in 1956, when I was 8 or not quite 8. And certainly, looking back, I can see that I had absorbed an anti-war, anti-draft mind-set, without a word being said to me, when my Daddy was recalled against his will to return to the Philippines in 1953, during the Korean War, with the Navy Sea-Bees (C-Bs, i.e., Construction Battalion) to build another naval base like the one he had built in 1945 as WWII had just come to an official end, but Japanese snipers still roamed the jungles of the islands. The snipers were still there in 1953, and they are still in my Daddy’s waking nightmares as he suffers from dementia that keeps him in assisted living and out of touch with place and time at age 85. They didn’t call it “draft resistance” when my Papaw tried every way he could to keep Daddy from having to go back in ‘53. He wrote letters to our congressman, called every possible military and government official, pulled in every favor he knew how to find, but to no avail. Despite the tears of my mother and grandmother, Daddy left from Dallas Love Field just after my 4th birthday, late September or early October 1953, and he came back sick in July 1954. Mother cried the whole time he was gone, or that’s what I remember. I became a future peace activist without anyone knowing it.

My activism began at Vanderbilt. It was the sixties. We were the New Left. And we were the cutting edge. And we pushed for a revolution in the country’s approach to education, gender, race, and all the other “givens.” We pushed for a cultural revolution, a sexual revolution, and a revolution in values. The results aren’t yet in.

But fast forward and I’m in the south and a civil rights organizer. And I am being mentored by the most amazing older people, veterans of the Old Left. And I am learning so fast it makes my head spin. I move along in life and am back to Texas and fighting again against the war, and again I end up brushing up against the Old Left and I am in awe as I meet WWII resisters, a survivor of Auschwitz who is now a pacifist Quaker in Austin, then New York City peace movement people making headlines are in Austin, staying in our back room, and the Old Left again become my mentors. At the same time, I am part of the feminist movement. I am aware we are not the first feminists — we aren’t aware that by the time our daughters we in college, we are going to be seen as 2nd Wave feminism and somewhat out of date.

Computers didn’t stay in my life with politics — they came back in suddenly when I went back to grad school at age 35, as personal computers were becoming common-place and affordable. My first home computer was an 8-bit Atari, carefully shopped for and selected. I jumped back in full-steam and by 1999 was learning html and designing web pages along with my youngest child, John.

I have been lucky to have a daughter move straight into 3rd Wave Feminism while meeting and learning from Old Left activists with me, at the same time. And I have been lucky to have a son going straight on through the computer age and the Millenial generation’s “Newer Left,” although no one has called it that, and letting me tag along. So I know about the Open Left and Web 2.0 and Democracy 2.0, and even Web 2.5. And I am excited. It’s 2008 and I think we have finally caught back up again to 1968.

And that is why today, after much agonizing, meditating, analyzing, listening, and praying, I am ready to say, “Tomorrow I am caucusing for Obama.”

Stay tuned and I will explain how I got here, a place I hadn’t expected to be, and why I think the rest of us from the New Left, and those still kicking from the Old Left, all need to be here.

Signing off now to get a good night’s sleep to be ready to work the caucus tomorrow morning.

Pamela