Editorials

...The space-shuttle Columbia can't get off the launching pad on time...

...that it's not easy victory, but weathering failure, that gives us body...

...Our century, so darkened by the hand of death, seems to demand the visionary sonar of bats, creatures who navigate in the dark, for whom daylight, our daylight, means blindess...

...It would seem the bag lady has a new agenda in mind, one that represents a sharp detour away from both traditional American utilitarianism and the self-serving ethos' of the recent past...

...Poland," Seweryn Bialer reminded us in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, "is the key country in the Soviet bloc in terms of strategic location, military and economic potential, and size of population...

...The family is breaking down...

...Can the government, the Communist party, and the evergrowing Polish democratic movement find some semblance of an equilibrium...

...In practice, the result is often a zero-sum game, with schools competing for the same funds...

...It is time to show solidarity...

...One school of diplomatic thought once argued that by assuring the Soviet Union of the West's abandonment of any intention to alter the territorial status quo in Eastern Europe by external force, we would create the security and relaxation of tension that would permit an ever-so-gradual internal evolution of Communist regimes...

...to reverence things for their own sake rather than for what they can do for us...

...Or as Rilke put it, Even when we throw all depths away from us: suppose a mountain has gold and no one is allowed to mine it anymore...

...You would think, by that token, we were all prepared to fathom the inverting wisdom of Jesus's parables - those shifty tales meant to blind the seeing and give sight to the blind...

...There are no clear answers to these questions, but the stakes involved are enormous...

...It is time to show solidarity.ed front...

...It expected managed change from above - putting too much confidence in the reasonableness of ruling elites - and it did not count on spontaneous change from below - giving little thought to the democratic capacities of ordinary people...

...To literal minds very disconcerting...

...Not only should this be recognized by those who have been sharply critical of other aspects of American foreign policy and military strategy...

...It's deflating of course - except that just when social critics have taken aim to freeze us in amber, Americans won't stand still...

...But it "works," the dualizing does, to deaden fear...

...If one thinks that, above all, public educational systems are , suffering from complacency, resignation, or bureaucratic arteriosclerosis, then one welcomes findings that may possibly jog public educators into action...

...And then there's all that trouble with industrial infrastructure and transport undercarriages - shiny aluminum subways and buses whose frames crack under the shock of rough trackbeds and potholed streets...

...Now we see that there is no safe and easy road to the easing of Communist rule and the loosening of Soviet empire...

...Unwillingly perhaps, the Western religious imagination is brought down to earth, to a collision of words made flesh, to put the ear to tomb doors, listening for the voices of the dead - voices like Gandhi's, Hammarskjold's, Osip Mandelstam's, Martin Luther King's, Oscar Romero's - or the myriad voices of Dresden, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and Cambodia...

...to poets a goldmine of figures...

...It is time for the American peace movement to direct some of its energies toward Soviet embassies and offices and even toward the representatives of hesitant allies like West Germany and Japan...

...Yankelovich's data suggest the vast majority of Americans are only a short distance behind this young woman that most of us harbor in our souls our own secret derelicts...

...As musicologists and poets know, it's in those empty times and spaces - which feel like death - between the beats, into which new rhythm, grace, flows...

...this reaction is popular...

...these critics should also realize that a Soviet invasion of Poland will destroy for an indefinite future all chances of constraining America's own imperial impulses and of achieving limits to the arms race...

...But does that have to be the case...

...It seems .that the newest round of debate about education could be far more profitable if responsible educators sought ways in which the two "systems'' could be allies instead of only competitors...

...According to pollster Daniel Yankelovich, previewing his new book in the pages of the current Psychology Today, there are signs - albeit shadowy and ambiguous - that there's a growing recognition among an overwhelming mass of Americans that we've been launching our individualistic rocket-egos on sand, that the wide open spaces of, our recent self-fulfillment decades have run us emptily into the ground...

...So goes the parable of Jesus's life...

...In part, that's apparently what at least some of the last decade's introspection has been about...

...Like what to make of jthe uncharcteristically introspective "me" decade we've just been through...

...we're living beyond our means...

...Like any seedy thing, the new agenda hasn't yet had much impact on standing U.S...

...The shock of limits...

...To focus, as we often do in this space, upon what's up front in the political arena may, however, just jam the mind's circuits...

...For the Soviets, the stakes are nothing less than the preservation of empire...

...Again, to literal minds, or "helpless giants'' - they're the same - there's only one response...

...It is not yet, he thinks, but could be the basis of a new social ethic - an ethic humbler, more reverent, and cooperative than the woolly wild west show we've staged in the past...

...If one thinks that public education is threatened by budget cuts and a flash flood of often contradictory and inaccurate criticism, then the Coleman findings are apt to look like just one more low blow...

...The image is not that of the serene Buddha, seraphically transcending this world of illusion, but of a figure stretched taut, bleeding, between heaven and earth - as if he would plant a living tree in the very soil of our illusion...

...SOLIDARITY NOW Confrontation between Solidarity and the government, Soviet military threats, Western warnings, prolonged negotiations, last-minute settlement, temporary relaxation...

...Project the problem outside...

...The parable of Jesus's life suggests that our failures may be more revealing than our successes...

...In short, freedom and dignity...

...The vertigo is particularly noticeable among the more "progressive" self-fulfillers, those for whom leaving a need unanswered verges on a criminal act...

...ZERO-SUN EDUCATION...

...Then sharply dualize the issue - the old Manichaean trick, which stops time, returns us to the Cold War and the pretended strength of militarization...

...On the other hand, the survival of the democratic revolution in Poland will be a crushing rebuttal to the argument that opposition to Communism must take precedence over all other international goals because Communist totalitarianism is "irreversible...

...Then, thanks to OPEC shieks, deferred payments for the Vietnam war, and further deferred costs of industrial pollution and waste - why must we clean up after ourselves when we'd rather "get on with it...

...The policy that Washington has been pursuing on Poland is a prudent one...

...They will not be silent...

...Fill in the blanks...

...The dismantling of that empire is fraught with danger...

...The bag ladies down there won't let us...

...2) in terms of student body diversity, Catholic schools may be "much closer to the American ideal of the 'common school' " than public schools...

...like "Hal" in 2001 Space Odyssey, the back-up computer complains of not being fed the proper diet of information...

...If you think we've got maintenance problems now, wait...

...That theory was partly valid...

...Critics have responded that Coleman's findings do not take account of factors like the greater family concern for education that undoubtedly motivates many parents of private school students, or the greater burden the public schools carry of educating the extremely disturbed, disadvantaged, or unruly child...

...How many more can it survive...

...There's probably no better place to begin fathoming, since it represents the daylight world par excellence, than with the disturbing reverberations of technological failure...

...First reports, however, indicate that the study demonstrates some things widely suspected but needing statistically sound evidence: (1) private school students are learning more even when their socioeconomic background is the same as that of public school students...

...It is true that lobbying about El Salvador or the MX missile system is at least slightly more promising: the decision makers are within reach...

...But it was also highly technocratic...

...to care for plants, animals, and the ecosystem...

...The Iranian rescue mission aborts: the helicopters don't function...

...That is, it may be more telling to examine what's been moving, shifting - like the quaking plates of earth's crust - in the cultural soil of American life...

...For the Poles, those stakes involve an escape from a regime of institutionalized humiliation, deception, and alienation...

...Even when we do not use our will: God is ripening...

...EDITORIALS: THE BAG LADY'S PASSION THE WISDOM of Easter mornings-that "fullness of time" which gives substance, body, to an empty soul-lies buried in the very midst of social, political, and religious conflict and passion...

...Some will continue to seek private alternatives, especially religious ones...

...Most Americans, will continue to be educated in public schools...

...the water will bring it to light, the water which reaches into the silence of stone, it does the wanting...

...Reactions to the Coleman study may depend largely on what one sees as the reigning problem in today's educational world...

...James S Coleman's controversial new study on "Public and Private Schools" was released too recently to be examined thoroughly in this Education Issue...

...solidarity - and Solidarity - requires even the long shot at influencing Moscow to restrain its forces and encouraging our allies to maintain a united front...

...And in the long run, the dismantling of that empire is a necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, step toward the establishment of a genuine global detente...

...Among fundamentalists and the State Department - no poesy in their unharrowed bones...

...For the peace of the world, the stakes are equally high...

...how many cycles like this, has Poland survived since last August...

...It may not be as narcissistic as some think...

...Hang tough...

...Can the Eastern-bloc hard-liners and the Kremlin overseers of the Soviet empire learn to live with a more-or-less permanent challenge to the legitimacy of their rule...

...Background sound may tell us more...

...institutions or politics but Yankelovich finds the majority of Americans now willing to sacrifice both money and status for a richer sense of connection: to deepen personal relationships...

...waste time" on rehabbing old homes and neighborhoods...

...Detroit's Big Three totter, appeal, like undeserving poor, for public assistance...

...yet it is a process thatwill be forestalled only by a return to no-less dangerous levels of brutality...

...Reports one highly successful young career-woman, partner in an "open marriage": "I feel dry-mouthed and empty" - and she's stalked by dreams of seedy bag ladies with whom she feels herself strangely identified...

...The dreams of which we're now made are obviously nightmare stuff...

...it also makes us forget how much Communism is itself the Esau to capitalism's Jacob...

...The Russians are coming...

...it would seem to have as much to do with panic at our own internal decay, personal and institutional, as with the real but limited threat from Moscow...