Monday, May 1, 1972
Nixon Decision Shatters Campus Calm
The antiwar demonstrations of the Harvard, Columbia and other students show that Nixon's Haiphong decision shattered the relative calm that had settled on college campuses for several years. The students were moved, I think, by two emotions -one, a sense of moral outrage, and two, a felling of terrible frustration at having been unable, over the years, to change the power decisions on the war.This mood of anger and frustration was behind much of the bitter activism of the 60s. It made the young, the blacks, the Chicanos, the welfare poor, invoke the image of "the system" as what stands in the way and must therefore be destroyed and removed.I've come back from a trip that took me to small and large campuses -at Santa Barbara, the Mojave Desert, Seattle, San Francisco and Chattanooga. While the proportions vary, you get in each audience a mixture of the questing and skeptical, the eager and hopeless. The analysis of our problems of today is often over-simple, sometimes mechanically and unknowingly Marxist. The specifics for action are usually reformist, mainly inside the system. The forebodings about the future are often dire, and deeply pessimistic. One girl blurted out, "Your basic premise is that the society is worth saving. Is it really?" A graduate student, with memories of Jack Anderson, asked, "How can we get anywhere if the system is so corrupt?" A black student said flatly, "There's nothing I can learn from whites."Yet there were other notes dropped, too. The eagerness was there -to know what is right, what to aim at, how to go about it. The sense of social possibility and vision keeps cropping up despite the encircling gloom. Moving from the great academic centers toward the interior, one finds a largeness of view, rather than a provincial narrowness.Americans are not a chosen people, whether chosen by history or some uniqueness. They will not be spared any terrible retributions for wrongs they commit upon others. They are not exempt from the laws of the history of civilizations that have raised creative civilizations to a pinnacle and humbled them when they grew rigid and arrogant.Though there are specific guilts for specific acts, I don't believe on the whole that Americans are a guilty people. They are genial, innovative -and blundering, with an often blundering leadership. Yet withal a kind of innocence remains in them, which cuts across parties and political labels, and is shared even by the cynical. The young have it in high measure, they call it "idealism," and when and administration bruises and outrages it, they march in anger.Someday we will look back at the tense Haiphong week and note that it contained not only the bombing decision and the Nixon-Brezhnev maneuvering and the student protests, but also the flight of Apollo 16. Was ever a moon flight so obscured and bedeviled by events that seemingly bore little relation to it?Yet the relation is there. It is a question of the uses to which we put technology. In one case it was a flight to the outer reaches of space; in the other a flight to the outer reaches of war destructiveness. It does not diminish the courage and the endurance of the astronauts to say that what war technology did at Haiphong was so loud that it drowned out what space technology did in the Apollo 16. The moon flight deserved better, both of the President and the young.The great myths of the future will be built around our adventures in space. It is a pity to have a moon flight almost ignored -as an already boring routine. It takes a generous and adventurous people to reach out to space. The two peoples who are doing it have the technology for it, yes. But of all the great powers, the Americans and Russians are also the two who have lived on a moving frontier and have the sense of the frontier built into them.Both of the megapowers confront each other today -in space, in the tortured Vietnam tangle, in the coming summit negotiations. Each is in danger of having a rigidity close down on its ruling groups. In each case the young fight the "system," but how different the area of tolerance allowed them and how different their chances of success.As the young Americans march in protest against the war, there is a danger they will forget in their anger that the nation's accepted values are based on their rights as human actors in the American political drama -not to burn or wreck or coerce others, but to speak out and to withhold the consent of their conscience."Nixon Decision Shatters Campus Calm", by Max Lerner, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Monday, May 1, 1972 and reprinted by permission from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.