In a room of 120 strangers in San Diego at New Year’s, it was an awkward moment: everyone had to tell the story of their first Celebrity Crush.
I told mine. Mine was the story of sitting with my father who was reading the New York Times. I asked him for the scissors, to cut out Ulrike Meinhof’s picture. I carried this picture with me until it fell apart. I was five.
It’s impossible that I knew who Meinhof was, or her role in Munich 72, or even that Munich had happened. At five years old, It’s improbable that I thought anything had happened at all. But she was a neat looking lady, and her picture was different than all the other faces in the newspaper.
Since 1975, my feelings about Meinhof have become logarithmically complex. They that say, they say it was brain surgery that changed her to a terrorist. That it was the surgeon’s knife what made her dangerous.
But in San Diego for the New Year, I remembered her again in that first role in my life, as that First Celebrity Crush.
At the New Year, I realized that of all the lessons of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the most personal one is that no one really chooses. No one chooses who or what captivates them. Would that we could, and frightened that we can’t.
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Photo reblogged from plsj:
“Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.”
(via unburyingthelead)
