One generation got old.

I slid into my political awareness in 1970, as I was plotting to leave home the day after I was 18 — which I did — but there were four months in between my official political stirrings and my eventual break for higher ground.

That spring, I was drowning in the white-breadroom community I’d grown up in, jammed up next to the same students since elementary school who were scattering like marbles on our upper-middle-class foyer tile floors, unconsciously deciding whether or not to embrace our parents’ socio-political sensibilities.