‘CHALLENGE essential to my life…’

While at an Advisory Board hearing for parents and teachers in Newark, NJ, we had several hours to distribute 400 CHALLENGEs. There was time to take in the bitter cold. I glanced at the nearby cemetery. It was there I made my decision to join Progressive Labor Party. I used to study there, as it’s a beautiful spot, full of trees, shade and quiet.
My boyfriend back then had urged me to get a subscription to CHALLENGE, though he was not himself a PLP member. After a year of reading the paper, I wrote PL asking if I could do Spanish translation. Not long afterward, a newly married couple came to my door, themselves students and members of the Party. They had checked with my (now former) boyfriend to see if he vouched for my honesty and asked if I’d like to meet for a few months with them. (Back in the day, a six-month period of candidacy was required.)
That very week I went to “my” cemetery to contemplate about what I’d been reading in CHALLENGE: the organizational powers of the wealthy had waged the Vietnam war; the logical conclusion being that a revolutionary party was the only way to end the atrocities of capitalism. I recalled how words like revolution and communism had at first grated on my mind. Gradually, they took shape with each article as part of the logical beauty of science. Though joining seemed like the right thing, I knew to do so would put me in difficult situations, and sometimes danger. I might lose my life.  
I pictured closing the lid on my own coffin, there in that cemetery. I then knew I couldn’t die with integrity unless I lived a life making progress for the working class. While my anti-sexist pride takes joy in the fact that I joined without my boyfriend’s urging and before he did so, it’s only right to thank him today for insisting I pick up the subscription.
These are the reasons why, for forty-eight years, CHALLENGE has been so essential to my life. It is much more than a newspaper — it’s more like a comrade.
Longtime Roja