How I got here

Here's how my perspective got the way it is: I was a pretty classic 60's liberal, born on Christmas day in 1949. I was an early feminist. Work-wise, I drifted from secretarial jobs to being an “engineering aide” at Bechtel Corporation in the early 70s; then, looking around me at the large construction engineering firm, said, hey, engineering looks like a very useful degree, so I went back to school at Berkeley in engineering (IE/OR, or industrial engineering and operations research, for you engineers). From there I followed one of my professors to work in software in silicon valley, and ended up spending thirty years in and around IT of various flavors, in the semiconductor industry. This gave me the opportunity to study the workings of capitalism up close and personal—and a fairly wild-west version of capitalism, because of the newness of the tech sector in those days. I worked on a lot of projects with corporate subsidiaries in asia, and more rarely in Europe. I got to know the people in those subsidiaries as friends and colleagues, and to know some corporate executives in the same way.

Meanwhile, around the 10-year mark of those thirty years, I managed to marry a right-wing republican. (A brother in law asked me how that happened, and the most I can say about that in a single sentence is: it was complicated). We have remained married, with some difficulty, for twenty-one years now, and let me just say that politics is not the high point of our relationship. More like a burr under the saddle. But, it has modified my politics in the following way: I can't stand listening to people argue, or bash other people or their ideas, from either side of the divide. I know for a fact that there are intelligent, thoughtful, and idealistic people on both sides (although of course there are also jerks on both sides). Speaking disrespectfully to the other side, or of them, is absolutely counter-productive. It works to keep us in the political deadlock we are in.