Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1981. július-december (35. évfolyam, 27-50. szám)
1981-07-09 / 28. szám
AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ i nursuay, juiy y. 1981. OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT Defending Whom from What? I recently sent the following letter to the White House: Dear President Reagan: Your courage and good humor in reacting to the recent tragic attempt on your life are an example to us all. The respect I have for you as a person makes it painful indeed to say what follows. Nevertheless. I am deeplv concerned that your policies are leading both the United States and the human race to a catastrophe from which we may never recover. There is grave danger that you have started us on the slippery slope toward nuclear war, and that under your administration the probability of such a war has substantially increased. I believe also that your economic policies are likely to lead only to further inflation. erosion of productivity, and redistribution of income away from the poor and the needy I must urge you to reconsider this course. I have been a member of the Republican Party in my mature years, believing that it stood for true conservatism and a movement toward peace. ! now see it as á party of dangerous and untried radicalism, destructive of evolutionary progress and leading us to eventual disaster. I have therefore resigned my membership in it. This letter was sent with great reluctance. I have always been afraid of crying “wolf," but when the wolf is so large, so menacing, so close, and apparently so unperceived, the duty to abandon the cheerful posture becomes overwhelming. Indeed, there are two wolves in the woods. One, economic incompetence, is fairly small or maybe middle-sized. Mr. Reagan lives in a dream world regarding the economy. If he thinks he can reduce taxes, expand the military budget by over 25 percent, cut civilian budgets sufficiently to offset this, stop inflation, and not create unemployment, he wants too many incompatible things. The war industry is a cancer. It has contributed to our lack of increased productivity and our growing incompetence as a society. The theory that productivity can be increased through redistribution of income to the rich has very skimpy evidence to support it. Rather, productivity can be increased, as in agriculture, by diminishing the uncertainties of productive people. Uncertainty, more than any other factor, limits investment and discourages the risk taking necessary for economic advance. However, the war industry, with its nonmarket intrusion into the economy, creates instability and sucks the intellectual lifeblood from the civilian sector. To prevent the war industry from contributing to inflation, we must finance it with taxes in excess of expenditures, for it diminishes the flow ol consumer goods and consumer incomes must be reduced proportionately. The economic wolf will scratch us and nibble us and make our lives a little more miserable, but it is not big enough to kill us. The big wolf is the threat of major war, especially nuclear war. A Terminal Disease There are two kinds of catastrophes, recoverable and irrecoverable. Everyone has little catastrophes throughout life— scratches, broken bones, illnesses from which they recover—but we all eventually encounter something terminal. There is increasing evidence that unilateral national defense is such a terminal disease, a system Aith a positive probability of irretrievable catastrophe. The world is full of relics of the collapse of previous societies. On a smaller scale, firms are bankrupted, colleges fold, families divorce, countries disappear, and all living organisms die. This is an inevitable part of the evolutionary process, for without death, there can be no rebirth. Furthermore, bad things die as well as good ones: “Who weeps for Babylon, who mourns for Tyre, who worships proud imperious Caesar now?” Duelling died and slavery died, and there are very few mourners. Systems that persist for thousands of years come to an end because they have exhausted . eir potential for commanding assets and legitimacy. Even stars that have existed for billions of years explode and die. Just because something has always existed is no reason to suppose that it will continue if its potential is exhausted. Unilateral national defense, I believe, is precisely in this category. It is a dying institution that can no longer defend; it can only destroy. Pistols destroyed duelling—it became too silly and too destructive. Slavery was only possible with prescientific technology; even the horse made it unstable (the human being is a most inefficient domestic animal). Unilateral national defense has an old and honorable niche that nuclear weapons have destroyed. The medical community is already aroused to the fact that unilateral national defense is the greatest threat to human health ever imagined. Now it is time for other professional, scientific, and business communities—who, in a sense, are responsible for the collapse of unilateral national defense—to become similarly aroused. A Better Gamble Fortunately, there is a substitute for unilateral national defense—stable peace. We already have it in a large part of the world, from Australia to Japan and across the Pacific from North America to Scandinavia. but not between the United States and the Soviet Union, who arc increasingly poised to destroy each other But it canVe achieved if we are patient enough There is not a 100 percent probability; it is a gamble. but it is the only gamble that can pay off The other gamble, that of unilateral national defense, means certain destruction. 55 hat can we do ’ 55'e can form groups to talk about it and face the issue honestly. Some will resolve the ethical dilemma by refusing to participate in unilateral national defense. Some will feel the need to keep unilateral national defense alive until it can be superseded by stable peace and multilateral defense. Each of us must resolve these ethical dilemmas in his or her own way. Some will give up hope and flee with their rifles into mountain hideouts to protect themselves against the hordes of refugees from destroyed cities. This is cowardice. Some will become politically active and run for office to try to transform the existing parties into parties of realism instead of illusion. Some will try to strengthen the world community of science. Some will work through churches, professional associations, businesses, and clubs. Above all, we must not despair, for that is self-fulfilling. 5Ve can and must turn around from the disastrous course we are now pursuing and claw our way back to safety. D. Kenneth E Boulding is a program director at the Institut? of Behavioral Science and distinguished professor emeritus of economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 5.5 percent of Hungary’s adult population of 10.7 million are voluntary blood donors. The 540.000 blood donors give approximately 20.000 liters of blood each year for medical SOLIDARITY / JACK CORBETT “Step one — join the Army.” DANSE MACABRE (Excerpts from the statement of the author, E.L. Doctorow, before the House Appropriations Committee.This committee intends to cut 1.6 million dollars from grant-programs for individual writers.) I cannot avoid the feeling that it is senseless for me to testify here today. People everywhere have been put in the position of fighting piecemeal for- this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across a broad front. The truth is, if you’re going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who’ve contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you’re planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped—if you’re going to eliminate people’s public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you’ve put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their food stamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems or arias cannot matter. If you’re going to close down the mental therapy centers for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if our theaters go dark or our libraries close their doors? The character of this new Administration reminds me of nothing so much as some evil landlord from a melodrama, one of those old-time landlords with a black silk hat and a waxed mustache rubbing his hands and chortling with glee as he slips into Washington. I am waiting for a rising sound of protest from the halls of Congress, but I have not yet heard declared what we all know to be true—that the so- called economic policy issuing from this government, for all its supply-side jargon and budgetary pieties, is a simple, undeniable eviction procedure, a brutal eviction of not only widows and children but all citizens except the already privileged, all interests except those of wealth and business. As a writer of fiction I could not get away with a portrayal of such unmitigated and sanctimonious cruelty; no landlord this infamous would be believed in a fiction of mine. Yet here he is, in one of his guises, pointing to charts and budget ledgers telling us who lives and who dies, and here he is in another, testifying about all the bombs and missiles we’ll be able to make from the money we take away from the poor. let ws learn Hungária»' # / CUSTOM INSPECTION VAMVIZSGALAT Will our luggage be examined? Where do they examine the luggage? Hand luggage is examined here. Which way to the eusloms? Will you, please, help me with the filling up of this customs declaration? I lane you anything to declare? I have nothing to declare. Megvizsgálják a poggyászunkat? Hol vizsgálják meg a poggyászt? A kézipoggyászt itt vizsgálják meg. Merre van a vámhivatal? Legyen szives segíteni a bevallási ív kitöltésében 1 Van valami elvámolni- valója? Semmi elvámolnivalóm sincs. AMERIKAI T MAGYAR SZÓ USPS 023-980 ISSN 0194-7990 Published weekly, e^»c. last week in July and 1st 2 weeks in August by Hungarian Word Inc. Inc. 130 E 16 St. New York. NY. 10003. 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