Dear Group:

I just wanted to introduce myself to the members of this discussion group.  My name is Brandon Sparks and I am 23 years old.  I discovered Chomsky in the bookstore a year or so ago by chance.  I may have just been browsing down the aisles and discovered his work Chomsy on Miseducation.  I remember being very impressed by the vigor and clarity of his work, even though I put it down shortly and did not come back to it for quite some time.  That time was directly after 9-11, when I was searching on the net, and looking for some straight talk.  I found it, with his evening chat at MIT after 9-11, a sober and passionate rendering of facts and ideas.

I have been hooked since.  Year 501: The Conquest Continues is open on my lap right now as I type.  I have purchased at least five of his books and often read his articles on z-magazine.  I have a B.A. in American Studies and am pursuing my graduate degree in the same field.  I am primarily concerned with human rights and social justice.  Chomsky has refined my passions, made me more political and less artistically concerned.  I am becoming to understand the power of mobilizing, organizing, on a grass roots level. 

I come from a small-town, though, York, PA, and there is little tolerance for diversity here, although we are getting better as a community.  I rarely get the feeling that Chomsky is evident here, except recently at a speech given on a conference about diversity in the community, where the speaker, a woman professor from an all-black college, spoke about history being written about the victors, and how we are always taught to think in terms of good and evil, right and wrong.  That we, and our changing allies on the global scene, are good, and that our enemies are evil. 

I work in the mental health field and in our program we manage the benefits of people with mental illnesses to reduce their daily stressors.  Most of them are impoverished and few work.  Some are hospitalized.  They mainly get money from Social Security, although there are some other sources of income.  It is a humble job and you have to determine your own rewards.  I would like to write my master's thesis on the civil rights struggle of the mentally ill.  I recently was hospitalized for depression and know the importance of support from family and the community.

I look forward to being a part of this discussion group.  Please excuse me for a long introduction, but I feel very passionately about our Noam.  Bless his soul.