Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation Of The Week 402

Certainly, my teenage self had been totally consumed with escaping. If I had written any book then, it would have been titled Getting Out - and most of my friends felt the same. Our dreams of escape from the neighborhood kept us from focusing on our probable fates as lifetime factory workers who rebelled only on weekends, or homemakers who played pinochle, went bowling, and sometimes got a beating on Saturday nights. Our imaginations rarely went beyond the two escape routes we knew: sports (if we were boys) and show business (if we were girls). In fact, we could point to two local celebrities to show that we also had a chance: a guy who had gone to a university for a year or two on a football scholarship before coming back to the neighborhood as a factory foreman, and singer Teresa Brewer, who had won the Ted Mack Amateur Hour while still in high school and never come back. Mostly, though, we were responding to the media. Sports and show business were the only places we saw people like us who seemed to be enjoying life and not worrying about next week's paycheck.
Gloria Steinem,

The Revolution From Within