PARTISAN REVIEW
67
"But what about
your
Christianity?"
''The early Christians went underground. They built secret com–
munities. They were young. And in a couple of years they took over
Rome. America is as evil as Rome. Thirty-eight thousand boys are dead.
Someone sent them there. Someone killed them by sending them. Those
responsible should die. That is Christian, that is just."
"Isn't there a way to avoid it? Tom asked, a little appalled at her
militancy. "¥ou seem so confident."
"Maybe there
is.
I don't want it avoided. The Bible says that
fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, will fight each other.
That'll happen. And there'll
be
class war. But we'll
win."
She touched
her stomach, "We're the future, you know."
I left Anne and went walking down to Lake Erie while Tom
did the interview once more, this time taping it. I walked for several
blocks along the lake thinking about Anne and about the mildness of
her way and about her paranoia - "concentration camps." Paranoia
riddled the Movement, being especially evident among the college rad–
icals, the professionals and the blacks who had, it seemed, good cause
for their feelings of threat. Twenty Panthers murdered by police this
year,
thousands of radicals arrested on various charges, some inducted
into the armed forces for opposing the draft. Beatings. Expulsions. Fear.
However, it was surprising to find that an identical paranoia ob–
tained among high school students whose contacts with the authorities
were less direct. Perhaps the reason for this is that the new generation
of teen-agers is not as affected by being raised on eight hours of tele–
vision a day as we have been led to believe, certainly not in the way
we believed. It is clear that their primary sources of
credible
informa–
tion comes not from the Cronk on the tube but from underground
sources: free press publications (there are nearly one thousand high
school radical newspapers), radical books and a kind of oral testament
circulated by kids throughout the country, tales of oppression and defeat.
Last year 60 percent of American high schools suffered disorders
which can
be
defined as political in nature. Most of the students involved
were blacks and middle-class whites. Emphatically, somewhere down
the line, American pedagogical programing has massively broken down
- the
grim
chute - high school to college to corporate job. The value
system has been eroded (a professor at Columbia, bemoaning the con–
tradictions and patent inconsistency of much of the SDS rhetoric, said,
"There is something palpably wrong, something terribly irrelevant about
the liberal dogmas if the young see radical nonsense as a rational al–
ternative to the liberal tradition. Som.ething is wrong with liberalism
