AMERICA II
269
So let the shitstorm come. For the only "promise to be found in the
activities of
the
young people today" lies in the extent to which those
activities are geared toward hastening its occurrence.
Nathan Weber
New York, New York
Sirs:
Last year, in a public high school in New York City, where
I taught remedial reading to teenagers who couldn't read at all, I learn–
ed that in my two classes of sixteen students not one had heard the
word atom (let alone hydrogen or whatever the new weapons are
called) bomb. They knew about Vietnam and about the war on poverty
because they were immediately affected by them both, but this other
thing-"atomic"-was a new word. Last week, when I read the Winter
PR,
I discovered that there are sixteen middle-aged writers who exist
as
if
they hadn't heard it either....
When I told these children last year about the bomb--despite
their exposure to violence-their reaction was one of disbelief and
their questions were so logically angry: "Why?" "How could we let
this happen?"
... We have allowed to become inevitable what never had to
be
inevitable at all.
. . . Faulkner seems to have been wrong when he said, in his Nobel
Prize speech, that "our tragedy today is a general and universal fear."
I am afraid that we are not enough afraid.
Sirs:
(Mrs.) Barbara
L.
Estrin
Providence, Rhode Island
Enclosed is my response to your questionnaire about what
we all think is happening in America.
It
is I admit quite an irrational
reply, but I am a fairly irrational person in a fairly insane society.
I am a senior at Western Michigan University who will soon be
migrating to Berkeley or the San Francisco State College. . . .
What's happening in America is that so many of us are writing
about what's happening in America that what actually is happening
in
America is completely obscured from rational view, is more chaotic
than ever. Multiple polarization has come into being at all levels of
non-life. Since the total absurdity of the entire undertaking has been
assured I am ready to join the Sontags, Joneses and Johnsons by
wasting good rhetoric and
ensoi
logic on the whole insoluable mess.
