Free First Citizen by Thomas T. Thomas

wrote to an Old Boy in the Petramin legal section, who wrote on my behalf to an Old Boy in the Harvard admissions office. My Berkeley records were still good and they passed off the semesters at the Commune as a spell of “social conscience,” construing it to my credit.
    Boston is much like San Francisco except warmer in the summer. Both of them were old working-class towns which had, in the closing years of the twentieth century, grown self-conscious of their history. They had tried to preserve it through commercial developments that sandblasted the brick faces of their factories, installed modern glass and air conditioning, and rented charming cubbies to bakeshops, brasseries, and boutiques in the hope of depriving tourists of their dollars. But the similarities went deeper.
    Both Boston and San Francisco were the hubs of their geographic areas—New England and Northern California, respectively. Both had cashed in early on the Information Society with high-tech colonies near to but not right within the city—Route 128 and Silicon Valley, respectively. Both had long been centers for the ultimate information flow, money—in the form of insurance and banking, respectively. Both prided themselves on regional foods—Maine lobster and Indian pudding, Dungeness crab and sourdough bread, respectively.
    It was the similarities, the consciousness of their own sophistication and tradition, that made these regions natural allies in the war twenty-five years later.
    A San Franciscan, transplanted to Boston and broad-minded enough to overlook superficial differences like winter snow and the catarrhal speech pattern, would claim native status within six months. I did it in three, but then my childhood on Massachusetts’ North Shore gave me a running start.
    For me, coming to Harvard was like coming home. The brickwork and the small-paned windows of the Yard, the winter-barren trees of Cambridge, the smell of old bookbindings and steam heat, the summer boating on the Charles ... after the politics, pot, and saucepan chemistry of the Commune, it was like being reborn in a dream of scholarship. For those three years, I worked like a demon, searching precedents, analyzing cases, drafting and then redrafting briefs, submitting to the Review and finally getting published.
    The law seemed like kumite, the delicate, feather-touch sparring of the Sensei’s karate school. For every attack there was a blocking move and a counter move to the block until your head buzzed with endless permutations of if-he-does-this-then-I-do-that, like a chess master mentally playing out three games in his mind before moving even one piece.
    I thought the law was elegant and beautiful, the highest application of human mind to human, social problems of rights, injury, and ownership.
    Ironically, the proposed Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments to the United States’ Constitution—the same subjects that had brought me low in Ballenger’s class—were the hot topics during almost my whole time at Harvard Law School. We debated endlessly, and smilingly, the enabling legislation, the text of the amendments, the course of the ratifications, the implications. And, like everyone else, we totally underestimated, by at least a thousand percent, the social and financial impacts if these acts were ever ratified.
    When we are young, the political and economic events of the day pass us by too quickly. We have no background of experience to say this assassination will be pivotal in the balance of power, that law will set the course of all that follows. Because of the course these amendments would set for me and my fortunes, I should have fixed them with my whole attention.
    What I had missed was the trend toward “market forces” that had grown in the United States over the past dozen years. Almost every industry had undergone a course of deregulation: banking, airlines, trucking, energy. They had shown what economic efficiencies—and havoc—could follow when a