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order to remedy the damage done to them by past oppression is utter
aIlathema to such people. "What about us? Don't we have tough lives
too and ask no favors?" is their self-pitying response. They are totally
incapable of grasping the extent of the harm done to the Negro ("Look
at Willie Mays? Wasn't he a poor kid?"), a harm that is unlike any–
thing ever experienced by a group of comparable size in American his·
tory. But then, judging from their reactions to the Moynihan Report,
many civil rights leaders and white liberals are equally unable to face
up to this fact. I don't think there will be a polarization of the races
because of the almost incredible patience and reasonableness of so many
Negroes themselves, but it is going to take a Third Reconstruction to
abolish the racial ghetto in the slums and at the moment this is not
in the offing.
5 and 6. Perhaps we face another interlude like the fifties with
Wallaces and Reagans threatening in the wings and stuffed-shirts un·
tainted by either ideological liberalism or Johnsonian political guile
(Romney?) acquiring the authority to end the war in Vietnam and at
least hold what gains in international sanity and social welfare were made
in
the past few years. The ending of the war, however, could permit us
to regain some forward momentum. I hope Tom Kahn's prognosis
is right.
7. Your last question invites too easy an affirmative response. Who
but romantic reactionaries will deny that there is hope in the activities
and outlook of young people? Anyone over forty who is likely to
be
included in this symposium has made compromises with the world, has
learned to live with hypocrisies and injustices and needs the moral prod
administered by young people seeing these for what they are for the
first time. And yet we are stuck with our sad wisdom, sadder because
so many of the extreme forms of youthful exploration extolled by Susan
Sontag far transcend our own experience and yet have their origins in it.
