"Parents' Responsibilities In The Nuclear Age"

"I don't know if you modern Ann Arbor residents know that this city and this university were power houses in the opposition to the war in Vietnam, always a leader and always an inspiration to other universities in the United States."

Dr. Spock speaks at the Power Center

On June 14, 1986, Dr. Benjamin Spock–pediatrician, author and peace activist–spoke at the Power Center on the U-M campus.

I'm very pleased to be here tonight. You know I've learned all that I have learned about politics and movements, working for peace during the Vietnam War. I was rather innocent up to that time and from time to time, I'll refer back to that experience. I don't know if you modern Ann Arbor residents know that this city and this university were power houses in the opposition to the war in Vietnam, always a leader and always an inspiration to other universities in the United States.

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Parents' Responsibilities in the Nuclear Age, Dr. Benjamin Spock

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It's fun to be back and see the scenes. I was here three or four times during the Vietnam War and at the very first demonstration in Washington after Johnson escalated the war, I fell in with a group of junior high and high school students from Ann Arbor as I was wandering around the White House picketing with thousands of other people. I didn't know anybody that I saw and was feeling rather lonely and I fell in with this group of students that befriended me. They were very open. Maybe some of them are here tonight. We kept each other company. They didn't have any money for lunch, so I took them to a greasy restaurant near the Washington Monument and then after lunch, I realized we were going to have a whole afternoon of speeches and that there were no toilets around the Washington Monument on that particular day, so I toiletted them all at the Willard Hotel which was just around the corner from the restaurant. I was afraid that if such a crowd of young people and an old geezer went in together, a functionary would say "Excuse me, where are you going? Are you residents of this hotel?" So I went in and cased the joint and found out where the boys room was, where the girls room was, and told them you have to go through the door, turn this way, rush downstairs and don't stop for anybody. I've never forgotten that aspect of Ann Arbor. I got a wonderful letter from one of those students afterwards thanking me for the lunch, thanking me for the company, thanking me for the toiletting.

The most tense country in the world

I consider the United States to be the most tense country in the world as far as my travels go and I think we have to broaden our perspective to get a more peaceful America, a more peaceful world. We can't just work for disarmament.

Anti-extended family

One of the things that has happened over the decade, and throughout the 20th century, is the gradual disappearance of the extended family. We tend to be anti-extended family. We're not just non-extended family, we're anti. I've heard people say, "The poor Jenkins. They have to have her mother living with them" as if that's a curse, whereas in most parts of the world this is how people get help, they get comfort, they get education. The young married couple find out quickly whether it's okay for a newborn baby to hiccup. When the young couple has a quarrel, they don't have to go to a marriage counselor. They just ask the mother. The young woman goes crying to the grandmother in the same house or down the street to tell her how bitter her experience has been with the new husband and the grandmother is able to tell her right away, "Oh, how awful that must be–you'll have to get used to it!"

In many parts of the United States we have lost any sense of the extended family but I don't think we've lost that idea. I'm very encouraged, talking to the young people who are working for SANE at the present time and talking with other people in the city and getting a sense there is a community here, not like New York or Detroit or Chicago where nobody knows anybody. It's hard for a young couple trying to make their fortune to go to a city where they don't know anybody, feeling nobody's going to feel prepared to help them. We've done that. We do it in America because getting ahead in the world seems the most exciting, the most challenging thing, and we think nothing of abandoning the family and abandoning the community where we grew up, because there seems to be more opportunity, more prestigious jobs, jobs with greater future in the big city. I sinned that way myself. There was a period in my career where I took three different jobs in an eight year period. Each one was more challenging and I thought that justified the moves, but I ignored the fact that my wife was very unhappy to be giving up her friends. I remember one of my sons when thirteen years of age, crying off and on for three days that he didn't want to leave a good school, that he didn't want to leave good friends. We're doing this all the time in the United States and it's part of this crazy idea that the job outside the home is the most important thing. The family and participation in the community have to be sacrificed for the breadwinners to get ahead.

The spirit of the assembly line

Another problem in the United States is the spirit of the assembly line, not only in factories, which you know well in this part of Michigan, but in offices. I think of pictures I've seen of insurance offices, 120 women at identical desks, all tapping out identical forms, all day long, all year long. The forms presumably mean something, stand for something, but the person making them out, and the machine; they don't mean anything at all. We take it for granted that this constant repetition of meaningless work is what work is. Yet in several parts of the world, people take great satisfaction in creating something like instruments for fishing or for hunting, or containers to cook with or store food in. People try to make them beautiful. Then they stand back and take pride, like I did when I made an eight foot sailboat years ago. I kept going down in the basement to admire it again. It gave me such satisfaction. How can you get satisfaction from tapping out forms or standing on an assembly line, tapping a nut again and again?

Inadequate day care

More than half the families in the United States have pre-school children; both father and mother work. Women have just as much right to a career as men. What we haven't solved in the United States is who is going to take care of the children in the way that they ought to be taken care of. The well-to-do can pay for this in a good nursery school and good day care center, but good day care is expensive. There shouldn't be more than seven, preferably six children per adult. Before the age of three there shouldn't be more than three children per adult. People on modest incomes can't afford this. In all European countries, the government is doing more than the government in the United States, to subsidize day care for young children. It's a disgrace, the richest country this world has ever known, has neglected millions of children.

Divorce

Divorce has doubled in the last fifteen years. I don't know what has caused it. I certainly don't look down my nose at it, as I got divorced myself ten years ago, but something's going wrong. It's partially the tensions of society, the tensions in the workplace, the tensions in the neighborhood that make us irritable and hypercritical of our spouses. Studies have shown that every member of the family, every child, the mother, the father, they all show symptoms of divorce for at least two years. It's a real stress. They tend to settle down and make an adjustment after two years but then most people who get divorced, get remarried. Then there is the problem of a step-family.

I became a step-parent ten years ago to an eleven-year old girl and it proved to be the most difficult and painful relationship that I've ever been in, in my life. Though my step-daughter denies it, it seems to me that for three or four years she wouldn't look at me, she wouldn't speak to me, she wouldn't answer my questions and she wouldn't smile while I was in the same room. It's bad enough to have somebody somewhere else treat you that way, but when you're locked up in the same house with a person who is blatantly ignoring you and hating you, it's difficult. It's been calculated that by 1995, there will be more step-families than there are non-stepfamilies. That's something to think about.

Superkids

I believe we have an excessively competitive society. It may have had something to do with our rapid technological progress, but I think it's counter-productive at the present time and is driving us crazy in this country. A recent ludicrous example is the interest in superkids that I get asked bout on television and radio all the time. In Philadelphia, it's been found that if you comer a poor little scared rabbit of a two year old and keep him cornered, keep his nose on the grindstone, you can teach him to read after a fashion. It's bad enough for that to be done to a few kids, but then parents in the United States think "Maybe we're neglecting our child. Maybe we ought to be getting him to learn to read at the age of two." How characteristic it is, that nobody stops to ask the question "Is there any evidence that if you learn to read at the age of two, instead of at the age of six, that you'll be reading any better at the age of nine?" Nobody has proved this yet. We're so alert to opportunities to get ahead that we get interested in forcing children in this way. We have discovered that we can teach 4 month old babies to recognize Beethoven's picture on flash cards. Nursery school teachers and day care center people tell me that the pressure is constant from the parents. "Why aren't you teaching them to read and write and do arithmetic?" Children develop in stages and there are stages where children learn one thing and there are other stages where they learn another thing and it's crazy to be pressuring them to do things way ahead of their time.

We're one stage less crazy than Japan is, as I understand it. I was speaking there a few years ago and they told me that the rate of suicide among elementary school children in Japan was shockingly high and is going higher all the time. And I'd ask "Why do Japanese elementary school children commit suicide?", and they would say "They don't think they're getting grades high enough to satisfy their parents." What kinds of societies are we living in, where children of that age kill themselves because they feel they can't cope with the pressures of their parents?

Something to believe in

We're too exclusively materialistic in this society, I think. All societies have to be materialistic to stay alive, but in most countries there are other values aside from money and prestige that tend to inspire people and stabilize them and help them to bring up their children. For many European nations in previous centuries, the family was the important stabilizing influence. There was no nonsense about bringing children up to fulfill themselves. If there was a family business, you grew up expecting to take a part in the family business, whatever it was. This gave a point to life and it helped parents to bring up their children. I would say the same thing about a country like Israel where adults feel that they're there to build a new nation, to make the desert bloom, and their children get this inspiration. It continues all the way through. I'm sure from some of the statistics that this helps children and parents to be more comfortable with themselves, to have something bigger than themselves, more important than themselves outside their lives.

Another shocking statistic in our country is that teenage suicide has quadrupled in the last twenty years. Nobody knows for sure why there's this great increase. I think myself that this first problem is that young people don't have enough to believe in, to sustain them during the stresses and the changes that go on in the late teen years and the early twenties. When you get older and have a job and spouse and insurance, you don't need so much of beliefs. You have the fundamental belief: I've got to keep working; I've got to get satisfaction at my job; I've got to take home the pay and take care of my family. But when you don't have those stabilizing situations, you need something to believe in and I think that our society fails young people in not providing them with that.

Violence

We live in a fantastically violent society. An organization concerned with trying to get gun control in the United States gave some figures a year ago showing the number of murders with handguns in European countries and in the United States. I should remind you first that 75-85% of murders are not committed by strangers, but by members of the family: angry spouse killing spouse, furious father killing rebellious adolescent daughter, adolescent son killing what he thinks is too oppressive a mother. The figure for no European country comes to 40 murders with handguns per year and the figure for Great Britain that year was 8. The figure for the United States was 11,550 murders with handguns. This gives you some idea of the seething tensions and hostilities that are swirling around. A lot of our people are out of control and don't know how to behave themselves. You combine this horrible figure with the fact that it's been calculated that the average American, from childhood to adulthood, has watched 18,000 murders on the television. Combine this with the knowledge that we've gained in recent years that every time a child or an adult watches brutality, they are brutalized to a very slight degree. Well, it can be a very slight degree, tissue paper thin, but if you multiply that by 18,000 murders visualized, you can see we're creating murderers in the United States, not part of which are those in that figure of 11,550.

The nuclear threat

Then we have the tension from the threat of nuclear annihilation. I think myself that this is part of the suicidal tendency of teenagers. I've seen movies of teenagers discussing their bleak future. The majority of the American people believe there will be nuclear annihilation by the year 2000. That's only fourteen years away. I've seen these teenagers breaking down and crying and I think that's part of their very severely increased rate of suicide and the feeling of being lost that so many young people have.

Are we right in worrying about nuclear annihilation? I would say, and I'm sure all of you would say, we're damned right to be scared of nuclear annihilation, especially with an administration such as we have in Washington. Our President is on record, our defense is on record, some of our negotiators in Switzerland are on record, as believing the United States has nothing to gain by disarmament. Since we're technologically superior to the Soviet Union, since we're a richer country, as our President has said, we have everything to gain by making all necessary sacrifices in order to get so far ahead of the Soviet Union in arms, that they see that they can't possibly catch up and they surrender to us. The Soviet Union asks "What do you want of us?" We tell them "Give up Communism," and that coming from the President and the Secretary of Defense is international relations simplified.

We also have an administration that believes that a nuclear war can be won, though the President has pulled his neck in a little in more recent years. He found he frightened the bejeebers out of Europeans and Americans by being so casual. He said we can probably hold the deaths down to twenty million - and that's supportable - and there can be recovery after that. In that analysis there is no recognition of the delayed deaths from the radiation, and no recognition of nuclear winter which they now predict will suppress the growth of all plants, which means we'll all starve to death because of this black cloud that will cover the globe for years and years.

What needs to be done

Now I will talk briefly about what I think needs to be done. Among other things, I think we need to bring up our children in a very different way and this has to do with not only easing some of these other tensions, but preparing our children to live more peaceful lives in a more peaceful nation, in a more peaceful world.

Less competition

We need much less competition. We ought to stop comparing one child with another. I think we ought to stop trying to teach poor little elementary and junior high kids to forget about the joy of games and to learn perfection and the importance of winning. Kids got along fine; they learned to play football and baseball and shoot baskets in the olden days before there were little leagues and they had fun. There was a lot of argument–and I'm not speaking against the impulses of fathers who sacrifice some time after work to coach their children–but I think that it's misguided. I don't think it's a major cause of the competitiveness of our country, it's more a symptom of the competitiveness, that we can't let kids enjoy their games, but have to teach them the importance of doing it well and winning.

I think even more ridiculous is the way we worship football at the universities. The president of the university gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to the football coach who goes out and hires high school students to come to this university, students who have no idea of coming to this university, who say "If he'll pay me twice as much as the other university, why not go there?" The faculty is told "Grade 'em easy," so they're allowed to stay at the university. How can that go down to the credit of the university, to have a successful team that's been bought? You know as well as I, that if a university does not hire a coach who can produce winning teams, the alumni will stop giving to the alumni fund. So we come back to materialism in all aspects of our society. My idea of a good sport intermural, maybe intercollegiate, would be frisbee. I see all these students on Saturday afternoons having a good time throwing the frisbee back and forth. But you know as well as I know, that if that became a major sport, the president would have to hire a coach who could produce a winning frisbee team and then the coach would take away all the joy.

No grades

A more serious example I think we ought to consider in terms of competitiveness, is to get rid of grades in schools and universities. I think it's wrong that grades mislead the student that he's got more on the ball if he gets better grades. It certainly fools the faculty that they have accomplished something more when they give good grades. There's no other reason for grading than that it's an easy way to keep track of students, keep their noses to the grindstone, and make them respect the faculty by threatening them with poor grades.

The Rockefeller Foundation years ago wanted to see what the relationship was of the competence of physicians a dozen years after graduation from medical school to the grades they got in medical school. They found, to make a long story short, there was no correlation whatsoever. General practitioners, who were practicing superior medicine came equally from the top, middle, and bottom of their class in medical school. The practitioners who were practicing poor medicine (and there are doctors who are practicing poor medicine), also carne equally from the top to bottom of their class in medical school. In other words, we haven't the slightest idea of how to teach medical students how to be conscientious persons after they've gotten out from the auspices of the medical school.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to see what this does to students. At Western Reserve University where I taught for the last twelve years, before I had to retire for age, they got rid of grades (which they found perfectly easy). All you

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We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to see what this does to students. At Western Reserve University where I taught for the last twelve years, before I had to retire for age, they got rid of grades (which they found perfectly easy). All you have to do is talk to students who aren't doing well. You can find that out. Any good faculty person knows that without having grades to go by. The pathetic thing was the first few years of when this no grade system came in, the students would whimper. They would say to the faculty "How will I know how I'm doing?" Think of the depravity, of the demoralization carried on during the twelve grades and the four years of college, that they would whimper because they're not getting a grade, so they won't know how they're doing.

More cooperation

I think we have to emphasize and somewhat overlap the last thing. We ought not to emphasize "get ahead." I think a majority of American children get the idea from their parents that they're in the world to get ahead. You can see why this happened. All the groups that immigrated from Europe, where it was impossible to get ahead, saw America as the land of opportunity. I'm not despising that, but I think that it's not enough to tell kids, "Just get ahead."

I think we have to teach them, first of all that they're in the world to serve their fellow creatures. I'd tell my child all the way through childhood, no matter what his understanding was, "There are lots of problems in our neighborhood, lots of problems in our nation. There are terrible problems around the world, and this is what you're in the world for. This what you're getting an education for is to help solve those problems."

I think we start out by not telling children to be, or allowing them to be cooperative. Children are wild to grow up to be more mature and more helpful. That's why a two or two and a half year old wants to help set the table and later on wants to help bring the dishes out to the kitchen. All you need to do is encourage this inclination of children. The trouble is that all of us were brought up more or less thinking a duty is unpleasant and the first time our child doesn't act helpful we get cross with them and scold them and say "Come on, be helpful you."

Children, I think, are basically motivated like adults. They're immature. They're inexperienced. They need quite a lot of guidance, but they're trying very hard to grow up to be more mature and more helpful. For example, if you have a good friend staying with you a few days and she's sort of thoughtless and sits down after supper and is watching television. You don't say to her "Helen, turn off that television!" You say "Helen dear, I'm exhausted. Seems as if there are more dishes and more pots and pans than ever. Would you mind?" Helen will of course immediately say "That was very unthoughtful of me to be watching the television" and generally it's the same with children. Maybe some of you parents will doubt that, but I've seen children who have been encouraged to be self-respecting and helpful and to be kind. They bloom in their maturing and in their helpfulness.

I think we should tolerate less quarreling. We're too fatalistic about it. I've travelled a lot in other countries and it's amazing how much less quarreling there is in other countries than in the United States. I think part of it is that our society is so tense. The pressures are on the parents. The parents quarrel with each other and turn around and scold their children. In other countries it isn't necessary for the parents to scold so much and therefore children don't quarrel with each other. I remember years ago a professor of pediatrics and child psychiatry visiting the Soviet Union (in the earliest days of visiting in the Soviet Union) and this expert was flabbergasted to see how well behaved Soviet children were in nursery school. He kept asking the teacher "How do you make the children behave so well?" In a sense he was looking behind curtains and under beds to see if there were mean teachers with whips to threaten the children. Finally an impatient nursery school director said "I think, professor, that the good behavior that you see is a result of the clarity and agreement of all of the people to take care of the children, the professionals and the parents." I think there's a lot in that. I'm not trying to sell communism. That's not the point. I think it's good for us to agree–not worry–about whether we bring up children according to Freud or according to Jung or according to Adler or according to parent effectiveness training, but to know that we're bringing them up to be kindly, loving, cooperative people.

No physical punishment

We should have no watching of television violence, and no guns, especially to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who is sometimes called the Prince of Peace. And this is the time of year when we load our sons with guns, helmets, hand grenades, and Rambo equipment.

We should have no physical punishment. Something like 75 or 80% of American parents are absolutely convinced you can't bring up children properly without spanking them. I think they are unaware of the many parts of the world where it has never occurred to people to hit their children. I think that physical punishment, if it makes children behave, makes them behave because they're afraid of being hit again and I don't think that that's a good or a lasting motive for people to behave themselves. I think children should behave themselves because they love their parents, they sense that their parents love them, that it hurts their parents' feelings when the child misbehaves or is thoughtless. Try getting that across to parents who are absolutely incredulous. I say for example that in the shop, or in the orchestra, the supervisor doesn't come in roaring and kick that person in the pants. He says "Jenkins, would you mind coming into the office." He explains how he would like a different kind of behavior and most workers will respond when they hear clearly what is expected of them. And most children, just like adults, will try to behave better when it's clear to them what their parents want. If we just go around yelling at them and whacking at them, it makes them more quarrelsome. It turns some of them into bullies. That's bringing up children differently.

Be more political

The other thing that we must persuade Americans to do is to take a lot more participation in politics. Only half of the American people bother to vote at all, yet you hear Americans say so proudly "Thank goodness we have democracy, the way the Soviet Union doesn't have it."

How are we going to get good day care in adequate amounts? By political activity. It's the only way in our society. How are we going to get good schools? A minority of our schools are very good, but a majority of them are not very good. And children are herded around and they're treated more or less like cattle and they're taught to to memorize, then recite. That's not what you should be learning in school. You should be learning initiative, how to take responsibility, how to solve problems. You should be encouraged to be creative. These potentialities in children are snuffed out in schools. The teachers are simply authoritative or they insist that the child stay passive and listen and regurgitate what the teacher is saying. This applies not just in elementary school; it applies in universities too.

How are we going to get disarmament? How are we going to keep our government from interfering in Nicaragua except by politics?

One thing to do is to get people who don't vote to vote. I don't know how to do that since I mostly talk to people who do vote. Another part of the problem is how are you going to get people to vote discriminately. Seventy to 80% of the American people believe in a nuclear freeze and they believe in non-interference in the affairs of other nations. They believe in taking care of those who are disadvantaged and cannot take care of themselves, but they love a President who disagrees with them in every respect. I don't know how to turn them around either. Certainly it's got to be done sooner or later. You can join groups. I think one of the inspiring things in coming to Ann Arbor is to find how many organizations there are working for disarmament and related issues like Central America. It's very important to get in groups. It would be nice if all the groups could get together as they've done here, at least to a degree. That's not the most important thing. It's for everybody to get involved in a group and get educated and have his own ethics, multiplied with others in the group.

Lobby

You don't have to go to Washington to lobby. If you want to lobby a Senator or a Representative you have to find out when he's going to be in the district and make an appointment. There's no point in going in as a single person because he can say, "He's a nut," or "She's a nut." Go as a group. You must have a name, and when you make the appointment you say Ann Arbor Citizens for Kindness to Nicaragua. The representative doesn't know whether you represent the twelve people who come or whether there are 1200 people. There's no need to take up his time by telling him how many you've got. Lobbying consists of making an impression on your representative, that you've taken the trouble to come there, that you're serious and that you're sensible people.

Write letters

There are letters to the editor which are surprisingly effective, because in every community there are hundreds and thousands of people who read the letters to the editor first. They love to get involved and the conflict doesn't cost anything.

Then there are letters generally. I'm amazed to find how many people, who are dedicated to a cause like disarmament, have never written a letter to the President or to their representative in Congress. You ask them why not and they give excuses like "I wouldn't know just how to express the letter." This is just crazy to worry about how to express the letter. All you have to do is to make clear whether you're pro or con. The President doesn't cali in the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and say "I want you gentlemen to see some of the mail I've been getting lately. Look at these margins. Look at the spelling here." The President doesn't see your letter. It's somebody in the White House's obligation to count the pile and to tell the President every week or two how the mail is going. I've gotten acquainted with dozens of congressmen and senators, all of whom say the same thing. It doesn't matter how principled you are, how strongly you believe in something, if your mail is heavily running in the opposite direction it gives you gooseflesh. You worry about what's going to happen next election. Keep that gooseflesh running up and down his spine.

Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is not for everybody, but if you've been voting, organizing, lobbying and demonstrating peacefully and finding you're getting nowhere and you can see that the country is slipping into a more and more desperate position, I think then

[Image text: "I will not play with bombs."] (c) 1986 Agnes Zellin, Impact Visuals

Spock (Continued from Page 30) it's time to become civilly disobedient. It's our country. It isn't Reagan's country. It's our children who are going to die, our grandchildren that are going to die, all their descendants are going to potentially be wiped out if we get into war. We have to realize we have a reckless, ignorant administration and we've got to impress them one way or another. One way is by civil disobedience. I want to tell you one thing about it. If members of the clergy are in your group, this gives you the feeling, I can't be all wrong. Also, it's good to know it disconcerts the police to have to arrest clergymen. They aren't trained for this. They are trained to rough up what they consider rough characters and not clergymen in clerical costumes. It's unnerving to them.

I was at one time asked by 150 clergymen during the Vietnam War period to commit civil disobedience in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. This is a story that shows you don't have to get violent, you don't even have to do anything real annoying. All you have to do is to stay in the rotunda of the Capitol building after 4:30 pm. The regulation is that visitors must be out by 4:30, so the policeman on duty at the rotunda said "Gentlemen, you'll have to leave. It's closing time."

You pretend you don't hear him. He has to go and call the Chief of Capitol Police who comes in with the regulations. He has to read the regulations and he is very nervous with 150 clergymen. He was shaking when he was trying to read this thing. Nobody moved. He had to go and summon up 20 policemen. They don't have 150 policemen to arrest 150 demonstrators, so each policeman will arrest several people. This is the tense part of civil disobedience. This is when the policeman comes after you. You watch apprehensively before that and are relieved to see each policeman as he comes forward looking at somebody else. Finally you see one coming to you, looking you right in the eye, and you think "What would my mother say?" Then he mugs you, takes your finger prints and leads you down the long flight of stairs of the Capitol and usually there are supporters, your children, husbands or wives and they clap for you and you feel just a little bit noble. Down at the bottom are the paddy wagons.

The paddy wagons in Washington are two kinds: the closed in kind with a slippery wooden bench on both sides and you can trust the drivers to be sadists. They rush full speed up to a red light and slam on the brakes. Everybody slides down the seats and crushes together at the forward end and then the light goes green they gun it and everybody goes back. It's also rather hot in the summer. The other kind in Washington are open-windowed buses which are open for air, but the windows are barred. They are much more comfortable and you can see where you're going. The closed kind are swerving around corners and you wonder where they are taking you. You can see where they're taking you in the open kind.

One hundred fifty clergymen were herded into the open buses and by this time they were also excited about having been bad boys and relieved that the worst part was over and when they'd see a pedestrian on the street they'd stick out their arms through the bars and it was comical to see the expressions on pedestrians' faces. They'd never before seen five busloads of clergymen going off to the jail and they all looked puzzled as they watched the buses go by.

You'd get to jail. They'd put you in a cellblock. In this particular case, one clergyman brought in a bible, smuggled in a bible. You're not allowed to bring anything in. He passed it around and the clergymen would read a favorite passage and then we'd sing and the singing in jail was especially magnificent. All the walls are concrete and it's much more cavernous than your bathroom. They were generally good singers as they had to lead the singing for all those

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years in church and they'd learned not just the first verse, but the second and third. So the jail was ringing with the singing that night. Most demonstrators will quiet down by about midnight This night the clergymen were still going strong at two or three oclock in the morning.

There are lots of things that you can do politically. I've only mentioned half of them and I'm not trying to get everyone to commit civil disobedience. The advantage of it is that it is noticed by the press a hundred times as much as collective demonstrations, especially if you're a respectable looking type. The important thing is to find what is comfortable for you and keep on doing it. So many of the best young people back in the Vietnam days who didn't mind going to jail or going to Canada, nevertheless got discouraged much too easily. They said things like "I wrote a letter to the President It didn't stop the war. Letter writing doesn't do any good.I went to a demonstration in Washington and that didn't stop the war." They had very little concept of how long it takes and how hard you have to fight to make an impression on the government and to change the course of history. It took women 70 years just to get the vote. The vote seems such a simple thing to ask for. How could any government turn down half the population who want the right to vote? It seems inconceivable, looking back, that there was such a thing as a denial of the franchise for women, that those women who fought for votes for women , it took them 70 years and in the end, they had to lie down on street corners in Washington to block traffic. They knocked the heads off statues of some of our national heroes in Washington. They even smashed some windows of banks and some of these were society leaders in Philadelphia and Boston, where people take their own opinions more seriously than they do in other parts of the country.

The case of Cary Dickerson

You have to fight, fight, fight, and most important, never get discouraged. It seems to me that's the clearest thing at the present time. There's lots to be discouraged about, but the most important rule is don't get discouraged. Now I fondly raise the question, does anything do any good? I would say it was extraordinary looking back at the peace movement and the Vietnam War movement which kept Lyndon Johnson from going for another term. You've heard that, some of you people who are younger? He only had one term plus a little bit left over from Kennedy's term and he didn't dare run again because there was so much opposition to his policies. Extraordinary achievement! T

I'll tell of one other person who inspires me, a little middle aged, gentle lady in Oklahoma, whose name is Cary Dickerson. She lives twenty miles from Tulsa. She is the proprietor of a nursing home, a small nursing home, very small. Her husband's a farmer. She read in the paper that the Oklahoma Utility Company was going to build a power plant there, not too far from her nursing home. From the sound of it, she went to the library and did some reading and disliked the idea even more. She hired herself a good lawyer. Eventually, to pay the lawyer, even though she got considerable support in the end, she had to sell her nursing home. She used up all her savings and she borrowed as much from her husband as her husband was willing to loan her. She found out through her lawyer, that in the regulations about building nuclear power plants, that citizens in the locality have the right at twenty or twenty-five points in the planning, to challenge the utility to show that they're taking all possible precautions. She and her lawyer did that. At the end of ten years, Oklahoma Public Utility Company surrendered to Cary Dickerson.

That's enough for my monologue. Now I'd like to get into some discussion. You'll notice that I'm very opinionated these days and I used to have quite a different approach. I used to have quite a different personality. I used to be much more cautious. When I was speaking, I'd say "on the one hand...on the other hand." Nowadays, I don't bother with "on the other hand!" But in life, we're desperate and we've got to make up our minds fast in what appeals to us and to keep on doing it. The fact that I'm so opinionated and one-sided gives you permission to argue. I don't like to call it questions and answers. That means that I'm omniscient and you ask me "Doctor, what about this?" I like people who are mad or scream or shout at me. I'm stalling right now for time to see somebody's hand go up.

Sponsored by the Coalition for Arms Control - 2nd District.