Kerson was born in 1946 in North Adams, Mass.; Pagan son of a Jewish family, white off-spring of America’s black history; man, born of an opinionated and outspoken woman, raised by a native American woman in an abandoned mill town; drilled in kindergarten to survive the coming A-bomb blasts; teen of the Vietnam war and acolyte of the psychedelic movement ; student of the new ethics, the new men and women and the revolution in the Americas; Sandinista, Artist. Ethical questions have always been the very sustenance of his intellectual and spiritual life. No wonder in 2006 he finally took up the question of capital punishment; grisly emblem of the long night of U.S. racism and class violence.