William Penn Life, 1969 (4. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1969-12-01 / 12. szám

people. We remember when 20 per cent of our men were jobless. And when Franklin Roosevelt cried that one third of our nation was ill-housed, ill-fed and ill-clothed, we knew he did not exaggerate. The failings of the past do not justify those of today, of course. But a realistic comparison reveals a continuing progress that is not a symptom of a sick society.

We have been materialistic because we have seen too many people suffer too much from material want, because we remember too many starving children, because we have walked too many miles through too many cold mornings to work long hours at low pay and return home at night to parents with fear and worry in their eyes. We determined it would not happen to you, that you would have vitamins and orange juice and milk and good schools, and a running start at life.

Because of it, you are the biggest, tallest, healthiest, brightest, handsomest generation to inhabit this land, and perhaps the world. You are going to live longer, suffer sickness often, work fewer hours, learn more, see more of the world’s grandeur and have more choice of your life’s undertaking than any generation before. Because we were materialistic you will have more leisure, more chance to achieve, more chance to spend the days of your years in meaningful, challenging pursuits.

You cry out against the injustices suffered by Negroes—and you should. But we remember when a Negro lynching made news only if it was public. We remember the “nigger school” down in the poor section of town where a few black kids, ridiculed and suspect for their ambition, could get six years of slipshod schooling. We remember when “nigras” came only to the back door, stepped off the sidewalk when white ladies passed, worked for 50 cents a day, kept to their ghettos except to work in the white community.

We are now told that we should share the guilt of forebears responsible for their enslavement, and make reparations for their mistreatment. The argument is insupportable. We are no more responsible for their enslavement than for the mistreatment of Koreans by Japan. On a more realistic basis, look at what our generation has achieved in the fight for equal justice: Negroes vote, hold offices from city halls to Congress, wear lab smocks and police uniforms. They share schools and colleges, parks, playgrounds, swimming pools and all other public accommodations. They are business, political and professional leaders, dominate sports and are prominent in the entertainment world. Intermarriage is not yet common, but laws forbidding it are being struck down. Social and economic barriers are crumbling.

If your generation can make as much progress toward racial equality in the next 20 years as we have made in the

past 20 you should be able to solve what we call the racial problem. But it is not a problem to be taken lightly, for it is rooted deep within both black and white and will not yield either to emotional demands or violence, neither of which touches the heart wherein the answer lies. May I also suggest that the cause of equal participation is not served by separatism on campus, segregated dormitories, or “black studies” that equip a man only to teach “black studies.”

You speak with commendable concern of economic injustice. But we remember when children worked in sweatshops, when miners attempting to organize were shot down like dogs, when striking steel workers were mowed down by police. We remember the county poorhouse, the chain gang, the hell of the insane asylum. Consider how far we have come, as well as far we have to go.

You speak of class distinction, of ethnic and religious prejudice. Like all people, we do tend to divide ourselves into classes—economic, intellectual, cultural. But the evolving picture, I believe, is more encouraging than derisive, especially in the economic sense. Predepression, the country was divided into a small upper class (about 10 per cent), a modest middle class (30 per cent) and a huge lower or “working” class. We still have a relatively small upper class, but the remarkable thing about our society is the upward thrust of the lower class into what can only be termed middle class in terms of income, ownership, education, taste, leisure, etc., and the shrinking of the lower class. The middle class sprawls across the socio-economic spectrum, even as it sprawls across the fringe areas of our cities. It is a mass of home-owners instead of renters, drivers instead of walkers, of vacationers, boatowners, stockholders who send their children to college. It is a vast stabilizing force, and it, rather than the “money elite” is the real force with which you will have to contend if you are determined to overthrow the existing order. And you will find it a tough nut to crack.

You say we are greedy, possision-mad. Let me say this for my generation: Never has a people given more generously of its blood, effort or material. We fought (not always willingly, but we fought) a far bloodier war than Vietnam to save the world from an unspeakable tyranny, and we then gave our wealth in rich measure to heal the wounds not only of friend but of foe. Show me a parallel.

Never has this nation taxed itself so heavily to give its disadvantaged—its poor, sick, aged, helpless—a second chance at a decent life. Welfare has become a way of life, perhaps too much so. So have pensions, hospitalization, unemployed pay, Social Security. The widowed are no longer herded to the county poor farm, the aged do not have to spin out their years a burden in the back room of their children’s homes. We have quit hiding our “crazy” people,

and have made a start in treating that most delicate of mechanisms, the brain.

We have given you a healthier world than we found. You no longer need fear epidemics of flu, typhus, diphtheria, smallpox, scarlet fever. We have banished the nightmare of polio. We are closing TB wards daily. Rickets and worms are rare. Childbirth is no longer feared. Improving safety laws protect the health of mine and factory workers. We are beginning to make startling progress in transplants, and are beating at the ignorance that surrounds cancer. We have pushed the boundaries of knowledge into the gene and out into space.

We have thrown open the doors of museums and concert halls where once only the rich entered. We have given you antibiotics, television, air-conditioning and transistors. We have made a start (late, but a start) toward healing the scars left on our earth in our plunge across the continent. We are writing new meaning into conservation, trying to stop the erosion of our soil, the pollution of air and water, setting aside land for public enjoyment, learning to work with the forces of nature to preserve threatened life forms.

We have given you the knowledge and the means to enjoy sex, as you should, and yet combat the population surge that threatens to engulf and destroy civilization. Our divorce rate shows that we have not lived up to our moral code nor coped adequately with the subject of our sexuality. Taboos of centuries cling to us. But it was we who initiated the drive toward sexual honesty and frankness. You can discuss sex, with us or among yourselves, and perhaps you will find the way to a saner relationship between man and woman.

It is in the field of social relationships that we, like all before us, have fallen shortest of the goal. We have developed weapons that can end all life (do not lament this; nuclear power can be made to serve man as well as destroy him, and the questing mind cannot be asked to draw back from knowledge because it may prove dangerous). But even with the threat of annihilation hanging over us we have not found an alternative to war. Perhaps you can perfect the social mechanism so that all men may, without the threat of force, pursue their course, in which we will no longer need laws or police to enforce them, or armies to prevent men of one belief from trespassing against others, though the violence with which you protest violence justifies little hope that you will. You must learn to hate injustice without hating the unjust, to hate war without hating those who resort to it.

Which brings us to the most sensitive of your protests. The root of your discontent, of our nation’s discontent, the toothache that distorts all other sensations in the body politic is, of course, the war in Vietnam. I oppose this war as you do, and have from the beginning.

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