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My father became disillusioned with the ugly reality of America as a young man in the 1950s. He left the corporate world, became a college professor and was active through the 1960s and as long as he was able, for a better world. A lifelong firm atheist, he read voraciously, always eager to dig into the roots and causes and to examine solutions to what he knew and urgently felt was criminally unnecessary suffering for so much of humanity. At the same time he taught me to play chess at age 5 and showed me the joy in how the languages of both math and music could be beautiful and could help make the world make sense.

By the time I was a teenager, our dinner table and our family had taken in people of all ages and backgrounds and points of view, ranging from mainstream liberal to fiery anti-American. The local meetings of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were held in our living room; radical literature came in the mail regularly. Our family went on a march over one of the bridges to Canada to send humanitarian aid to North Vietnam – an act that was illegal in the U.S. and risked arrest – and at age 12 my father took me to an invitation-only fundraising gathering for the Black Panthers.

I learned from my mild-mannered father about being afraid, but never losing the courage to follow your principles wherever it takes you. He worried every morning that the family station wagon would be seized for the federal war taxes he and my mother refused to pay. As friends and I walked out of school to head to an anti-war May Day demonstration in 1969, the first thing we saw was a hubbub in the middle of the street with my father spread-eagled across the hood of a car he had just stopped, stepping out with others to block the street. Later in life he joined in protecting abortion providers who were being attacked and murdered by Christian fascist woman-haters.  

We had differences! We had lifelong arguments over whether there was much of any positive change that could be wrenched from within the bounds of this system, from voting to policy advocacy. When my father read Bob Avakian's memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, he commented about how much it resonated with him, even though “Bob came out of those times more radical than some of us.” He was among the first readers of the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Avakian, and he quickly wrote his serious comments and suggestions.

t was a terrible disappointment to my father in 2014 that a medical emergency forced him to cancel the trip to NYC for the dialogue between Bob Avakian and Cornel West at Riverside Church, sponsored by Revolution Books, “Revolution and Religion: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion.” But in 2016 he was thoroughly delighted to visit the then-new Revolution Books in Harlem. He excitedly piled up his book discoveries on the counter, attended a lively presentation on evolution and the deep discussion and debate that followed with a full house of students and Harlem residents, and he got to speak with Revolution Books spokesperson Andy Zee. Then he relished an energetic argument with relatives in the car over whether we were “too hard” on religion.

By 2020 my dad described himself as “not old, but positively ancient.” But he wasn't too ancient to be deeply moved by the powerful international protests and awakening to white supremacy sparked by the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Coming through the terrible decades after the 1960s and 1970s, he had not expected to see such a beautiful uprising in his lifetime. My father never gave up hope for a better world, and he found real hope in Revolution Books. He was a regular donor to the bookstore, telling me “We CAN'T lose Revolution Books.”

As I mark this first anniversary of my father's death, I wish he could be here to feel the winds of the great storms rising as 2024 opens, and to see his hope for a better world find expression in the life-and-death battles to come over the future for humanity.

So I decided that the best way to give real shape to my father's hopes, and to the hopes shared by so many, is to put this challenge to you who are reading this. In honor of all those who are searching for real hope, who refuse to surrender their humanity or deny the humanity of others in this world; in honor of all those who find joy in the beauty that human beings are capable of creating and want to see a world where that can flourish ... join me. Join me in sustaining and growing this incomparable place that is Revolution Books. Join me in giving the support that will make this bookstore, and this revolution and its leader, Bob Avakian, known, debated, followed widely.

Bring many more into these doors and into the struggle to give up and put down the illusory and delusional “hope” of change in this system. Bring with us, in spirit and in the flesh, those who know, and those who don't yet know, that in finding Revolution Books they can be part of turning the coming showdowns into the doorway to a future fit for all of us on this earth and for the earth itself. The time is NOW.

My challenge to you:  I will match the next $1,000 in donations to Revolution Books... if that goal is reached by December 24, 2023.

Thank you.