A New 'Peril'
McCarthy, Abigail
At holiday parties it is always best to preserve the peace of the season by remaining imperturbably calm in the face of the most outrageous conversational gambits. Who knows with what fears...
...looks into the tangles of "legislative warfare," including current voterinitiative campaigns...
...For while his work is described as "the only book that tells all sides of the nuclear energy story," its emphasis is really on the atom's most vocal and responsible critics...
...Just before Christmas we here in the nation's capital were treated to the spectacle of immigration officials and local police raiding a pleasant A NEW 'PERIL' ABIGAIL MeCARTHY Sunday afternoon soccer game on the Ellipse within sight of the White House...
...This monomania is bad enough in the lower echelons of officialdom, but the fear seems to be spreading to the sophisticated and the intellectuals as well...
...MeCarthg (C~t...
...She believes that social inequities can be assessed and changed...
...If we're wrong we can do something else...
...Who are the new immigrants7 "They are persons, men and women, pushed out of their own societies by industrialization based on capital-intensive technologies . . . . They are not a new phenomenon...
...Do they burden community services...
...And yet it contains many details and procedures that--if continued and carried to extremes--could approach the scale and consequences predicted in The Prometheus Crisis...
...After all, it's just as irresponsible for boosters of the atom to predict a glorious future, in which all of today's problems are "solved," as it is for critics to assume that today's problems necessarily will be tomorrow's catastrophe...
...For it's only if we are careful to identify and admit the problems of the past and the present that we'll be able to avoid the fictions of the future...
...At least partly, it seems...
...It is ironic to see our debate mirrored elsewhere, but troubling to wonder if it will go on forever...
...it is so today...
...One is a critical review, the other more a plea for educational vision...
...The principal difference between these two books, it seems to me, is their perspectives...
...Like the authors of Prometheus, Oison spends some time looking into "the future," ending with a sobering quote from environmentalist David Brower...
...LEO J. O~DONOVAN, S.J...
...rather than facile dichotomies and phony indictments...
...Social criticism, open discussion, and moral theory would be indispensable elements in any productive approach to education...
...Past, present, or future...
...which is primarily concerned with the spiritual renewal of the recovering Catholic alcoholic...
...The parallels to the decline of Rome were amazing, he said as he gestured with his cup of eggnog...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abilp~i...
...DONALD L. MUENCH "iPropka~Pkllo~ Cambridge, Mass...
...Even those persons here without documents often have their taxes withheld and/or do not request refunds out of fear of filing returns . . . . For every evader there are probably two others who comply...
...May it not be that only in response to being invited to walk the way of life can we hope for 9 union of creativity and conscience, of vision and action...
...Until then, there is no reconciliation between them and this one member of the Church...
...They were after aliens...
...All these facts are in such direct opposition to the stereotype that many people will simply refuse to believe them...
...So I simply murmured noncommittally one night in late December when a fellow-guest inveighed against the forces bringing "civilization as we know it" to an end...
...Every one pays sales tax...
...Fortunately, sociologists and anthropologists have begun to do just that...
...Weston School of Theology 7mltermtee Prior Lake, Minn...
...Do Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl figure in this company for him...
...Who knows with what fears and uncertainties the" speaker is beset, what anxieties have been awakened by the emotional currents and the memories stirred?realmost always memories of times which seem to have been more secure, more untroubled when seen over the blur of the years...
...To the Editors: Reading John Druska and Jean Bethke Elshtaln in your October 8 issue is at once a tonic and a trouble...
...9 . . Many of the Colombians in...
...He looks aim to the model of a fellow teacher...
...In Nuclear Power Walter C. Patterson, who lives and writes in England, gives the average reader a fundamental briefing of his ~opic...
...But most of Fuller's other facts are true, and as ominous as the Prometheus reactor's fiction...
...and speculates about where modern society's commitment to the atom will likely lead...
...The NCCA would like to feel that its "Credo" statement rr...
...tells how their fuel is mined, milled, enriched, used, and (maybe) disposed of...
...Because as the debate becomes more polarized some of the crucial subtleties can become simplistic---especially when they're being debated in media-minded election campaigns, as they were this fall...
...citizens no longer wish to do: as restaurant and hospital workers, baggage handlers, parking lot attendants, janitors and custodians, domestic servants, factory workers . . . . For complex reasons, most advanced countries still have a residue of 'drone' work at the bottom of technological society, a secondary labor market of jobs with little security and few benefits...
...It is a demographic fact, the sociologists say, that it is often the most capable, the most energetic and dynamic, who leave "the sending countries...
...To the Editors: Thoroughly enjoyed Father Fichter's sociological portrayal of the topic of Temperance [Sept...
...Goetho...
...But as a teacher of theology, I am reminded so much of my own students and colleagues...
...A version of it is still alive today among Native Americans...
...But your two writers are divided on their authorities...
...Queens are buying homes...
...He reviews the nuclear industry's yawning "credibifity gap...
...Indeed, the "eight scientists and professionals" who read the manuscript "to insure its accuracy," a Bantam publicist concedes, are the critics themselves...
...Let's put it this way," Brow~r says of his struggle with the nuclear industry's proponents...
...And for the moment that gives ,both critics and boosters a field day...
...It need not...
...So we are urged not to retreat from the duties of reason nor to settle for a bourgeois split between reason and feeling...
...Also of particular interest was hh reference to the C~lix Society...
...There surely are "illegal aliens" from Canada, from Asia, and from eastern Europe, but they do not seem to be being pursued with the same enthusiasm as are those from south of the border...
...no child educated in a public school need ipso/acto be blind to that respomibility...
...Although many have high qualifications, at least at first most do low-paid, low-prestige jobs that U.S...
...That was so in the past...
...Fiction...
...gEV...
...24] in its various fights...
...If they're wrong, we're dead...
...Do they pay taxes...
...The two novelists were carried away when describing that plutonium---a long-lived radioactive contaminant--has a half-life of 240,000 years...
...OOOOOOOOO CORREBPOIqDEMCE (Continued/rom page 3~) forgiveness...
...Many studies among new immigrant groups --Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, Greek, Chinese and others--seem to indicate that the opposite of the stereotype is true: the demands are low, the contributions are high--or, at least a trade-off...
...Knowing that I say this in still another pitch from both Druska and Elshtain, my own view is that we can finally take the way to life only if it is a covenant promised to us by 9 companionship that is unfailingly true...
...And now that we are weakened," he ended, "they are coming in like the Visigothsmthe new barbarianswthe Latin Americans are simply flooding in from the South...
...migrants always have done . . . . Now the new immigrants are doing them, and this perhaps is their great contribution to the host society...
...Everyone works, and each makes a contribution . . . . " Do they take jobs away from Americans...
...Now of course your two essayists have placed their voices differently in their two pieces...
...Instead, they are often fiercely independent and fall back on their own resources and networks in emergencies...
...To many of them the "first" commercial breeder is planned for Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the 1980s...
...One of the most interesting studies was described by Dr...
...That almost broke the peace, but we were interrupted before I could begin to argue...
...Fact...
...And this he does brilliantly, by marshaling a vast collection of technical, legal, and political facts in a very readable, though selective, style...
...most perceive themselves as economic refugees, seeking opportunity to better themselves, to educate their children and to save . . . . Whether or not they do return (to Colombia), almost all plan to do so...
...And that in itself is worth remembering because there are today many proponents of nuclear power-and many serious, nonfiction writers in the nuclear field--who pretend that it didn't...
...It's only 24,100 years...
...they pay property taxes and keep up property values because for many their homes are an investment . . . . Welfare dependency is minimal, and has changed hardly at Commonweal...
...Druska looks to "prophet-philosophers" like John Holt and Ned O'Gorman...
...In assessing the fact and fiction of these two books ir possible to find some errors...
...He describes in a straightforward and readable way how reactors work...
...The National Clergy Council on Alcoholism has welcomed Fr...
...Yet other studies bear them out on the Ecuadoreans in the Washington area is strikingly similar in fmdinSS, for example...
...We children of "old immigrants" seem to be in danger o]F developing an obsession about the "new"----one almost as virulent as our obsession with the "yellow peril" in the earlier part of this century...
...Of course they do...
...Can you guess who calf most often for responsible creativity and who for the reflecfive refinement of conscience and theory...
...The evidence contradicts that notion...
...Both propose a messurea evaluation of learning situations f "The ancient languages are the scabbard which holds the mind's sword...
...Little by little, the fact should ride down alarm if we can make them more widely known...
...An example...
...This should not surprise...
...It does not do to counter this fear with reminders that a Spanish-speaking people settled vast tracts of the present United States long before our forebears touched shore...
...But surprised that he failed to mention the Irish "Pioneers"--a total abstinence league founded in Dublin in 1898 by a Jesuit priest, Fr...
...Elshtain, on the other hand, takes her stand on critical inquiry...
...More so, in fact, because the Fermi fast-breeder reactor did, and does, exist...
...There is a third way which combines freedora and discipline, he thinks, by introducing students to the self-discipline required by any really creative work...
...In other words, the future of nuclear power really depends on your own assessment of the present----and your faith in fool-proof technology...
...With its roots in Old Testament covenant theology, this tradition speaks of eternal life and eternal .death as the fundamental alternatives posed to human beings...
...For there's legitimate dispute about not only what they are, but also what they mean...
...In that sense it's worth considering the two together...
...Because if we can't learn from the "facts" of the past and presenr we may be inviting the "fictions" of the near future...
...The park police on their horses joined the fray and terrified soccer players jumped into the Potomac channel in their efforts to escape...
...She herself first learned the difference between the promise of America and its reality while she was a public school child pledging "liberty and justice for all" before the flag...
...The fourth book also surveys the nuclear scene, but without Fuller's attention to accidents or Olson's concern with the atom's foibles and follies...
...Both are concerned with~the vulgarization and exploitation of language which in turn exploits and vulgarizes its users...
...It's history...
...In a recent issue of the New Republic the usually sardonic but almost always unflurried TRB heralded Mexico's new Preisdent with a dissertation on the horrors of Mexico's population problem and did so in terms of its threat to us--the threat of an illiterate peasant population pressing on our border...
...61 all in the 1960-1970 decade, the years of greatest Hispanic influx...
...and examines nuclear power's safety and economic problems...
...Up-to-date facts about "abnormal occurrences" and industry defections and unexplained deaths that should give any critical reader the willies...
...A critic of nuclear power can gaze into the future and conjure up a world in which largescale use of atomic energy will create countless opportunities for terrorists to steal radioactive material and make an A-bomb...
...and that "nuclear parks" are now being planned that will locate radioactive stockpiles near as many as 20 power plants...
...Why do they come...
...Drnska argues that we are not forced to choose between "salutary prescripfive methods" of teaching our language or else "volatile creative ones...
...The hope of walking in the way of the Lord is not meant to be a distraction from the issues of everyday life but rather a revele.tion of their radical depth and their relevance to the full fruition of life...
...A disturbing spectacle evoking memories of the Cossack raids of yore, in this last quarter of the Bicentennial year...
...Elshtaln is eloquently dyspeptic at simplistic condemnations of American society and politically naive diagnoses of its contemporary malaise...
...She summarized her findings by posing and answering pertinent questions...
...In good measure, he urged his teaching colleagues to opt for "liberty with responsibility...
...SUMMER LANGUAGE PROGRAM (BiMkud Gmk sad Hsbmw) June 6 - July 29 PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Pflnsetaa, New ~ 01IS40 Princeton Theological Seminary admits students of any race, color and r~tlor~l or ethnic origin and without regard to sex...
...Fichter's interest in the field of alcoholism these past few years...
...state, local and national governments are net gainers...
...Each in a different way'is attracted by alternative ways of teaching and riving...
...Elsa Chancy of Fordham Universityma study which she had co-authored with a Colombian sociologist (working in Colombia) of the Colombian colony in the borough of Queens, New York...
...May it not be that our debates over innovation and analysis suffer from a fundamental arrogance of our only partially emancipated reason...
...The third current book, Unacceptable Risk, is a nonfiction attempt by Chicagn-based writer McKinley Olson to review the nuclear power controversy...
...There is an old theological motif of the Two Ways...
...It is the present situation which frightens, and it is the present situation which must be sensibly discussed...
...Like the older immigrants of the last century the new immigrants are in the mold of the law-abiding and the hard-working...
...But beyond the publisher's fiction that Olson's book "Cells all sides" you'll find a wealth of well-researched and clearly explained facts...
...Patterson halts short of either endorsing or condemning nuclear power, but warns that "if we undertake it now we do so for all time," a concern that a recent British Royal Commission raised when it recommended delaying "as long as possible" the spread of atomic technology...
...Fuller reports the past...
...How much this has been stimulated by the concentration of the immigration department on "illegal aliens" and the press releases citing millions of people without passports or papers living here as public charges draining our resources is a question...
...The theoretical work of Kant or Freud is the kind of guide she wants...
...A booster, on the other hand, can say that by that time adequate safeguards to protect the material will be designed and installed...
...Those are all perplexing questions for anyone trying to follow and understand today's nuclear-power debate...
...Cullen...
...This group demanded a two-year probation period before admittance to prove one's intention and sincerity...
...Fuller, too, places the Windscale reactor to the east of England's Lake District, when it's really to the west...
...Perhaps, then, a careful follower of the nuclear debate should demand that whoever is speaking or writing be specific about sources and tenses...
...Perhaps, too, we should be more critical of everything we read and hear about nuclear power...
...At a recent meeting at the Smithsonian Institutins they addressed themselves to the stereotype of the new immigrant: that their contributions are low, their claims on the community high...
...When northern Italy industrialized between i850 and 1950, Italy exported a whole other Italy to many countries of the world, including Latin America...
...These are the kinds of jobs im(Continued on page 61) 21 January 1977:40 also worth remembering when you consider that there are today factual proposals for building four-reactor power complexes (under separate domes...
...q'hey come to work...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 2
