VERSE
Wallace, Robert
complicated and fraught with obstacles. It is highly tempting for the leadership in such nations to avoid the burden of these efforts if they can see any alternative to it. The Green Revolution...
...At five o'clock, in the first gray light, a wedge of tiny, fanning ripples like a feather wanders on the incoming tide: somebody struggling...
...The sun plunges westm the dry, gray dock, the green creek whirled by a boat's wash into Queen Anne's lace...
...The problem was that Hitlerwas in some sense a "unique" phenomenon, that is, a foreign statesman absolutely beyond appeals to reason and humanity...
...Commonweal: 175...
...More to the point of this essay is that just because a number of complexities arise when our ideals confront reality, this fact does not absolve us of the duty of attempting to realize those ideals within the limits established 'by reality...
...Not to make choices on the protection and extension of these values will in itself be a choice--for abdicating them...
...Clearly the United States in the world arena today is confronted with some serious challenges to its fundamental national values, particularly its commitment to liberal democracy and an improving standard of life for the deprived peoples of the developing world...
...It should be observed that when this became clearly evident with the outbreak of war the signers of the Oxford oath, as Churchill himself noted with admiration, rechanneled their moral commitment: they served "king and country" against the Nazis at heavy cost to themselves...
...When Great Britain and others eventually did react World War II was the result...
...In the early nineteen-thirties a number of young people in Great Britain signed the so-called "Oxford oath...
...two red-billed skimmers like swooping fighters in the shadow of a marshy bank...
...those adhering to it pledged that under no circumstances would ,they "fight for king or country...
...or into waves...
...appeasement" of one's supposed adversaries, may be both morally and practically the best course...
...It is possible after all that that work may in the long run have the beneficial effects that were in fact postulated for it...
...level, easy where I am, or lifted by the tide, the same...
...The Oxford oath was a pacifist declaration...
...I want more than there is: a miraculous commotion, stars over the roof, mirrors, the fine gold hair...
...Obviously not...
...In most circumstances, popular pressures on governments tO exercise restraint, and even the...
...More important, Hitler took the oath as an important piece of evidence that the English had gone soft and could not be counted on to oppose his designs...
...Flat to my knuckle, he dries out...
...Gold-leaf, and then moon-foil...
...Does this mean that the work leading up to the Green Revolution never should have been attempted...
...To the extent that there is a tendency today for Americans to abdicate their moral vision, particularly in the sphere of foreign policy, I would suggest that it derives precisely from a n unwillingness or inability to admit that the achievement of moral values through political action does have to take into consideration the non-perfectionist ethic and the difficulties of knowing whether in each case our actions really will have the desired moral effect...
...flutters to a piling to await the sun...
...In the event the Oxford oath was not only misdirected in its emphasis but had almost exactly the opposite effect of what it was intended to achieve...
...I cup him up, a half-inch moth, white, gray, and tan like marbling on an old book, with delicate crimson antennae...
...The British government was hardly oriented toward a major new European conflict...
...Basically it was a reaction to what was seen as the futile carnage of World War I and it was designed to put pressure on governmental leaders and specifically those in Great Britain to engage in serious disarmament negotiations and to eschew war as a tool of national policy...
...The Green Revolution may have seemed to be just such an alternative but its principal author, Nobel Prize-winner Norman Borlaug, may increasingly be viewed--perhaps irrationally and unfairlymas having been the proverbial Greek bearing gifts...
...But who can condemn the moral impulse that led to the Oxford oath, even if we know in retrospect that it may have encouraged Hitler along the path of aggression...
...The point is that these young Englishmen made choices in a period of moral crisis even if they have been been different ones at different times...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ROBERT WALLACE MORE TBAN TBERE IS Wanting more than there is, I thin myself to the surface of water, transparent, reflecting light, brushing air, keeping at an even distance from the clouds and from the crystal, pink, orange, white pebbles, from the silt, crabs, sliding starfish, a needle-fish snaking its fire-hose snout around a clump of mussels-dear, faintest green, a lens...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 6
