Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Poland's precipice
September 1,1939, Hitler invaded Poland. September 1,1989, Poland's new prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki and his colleagues in Solidarity are negotiating to bring a new...
...The economy, which will take years to build, must quickly supply certain basic needs: food and housing...
...in April 1990, the twentieth anniversary of the first Earth Day.sary of the first Earth Day...
...In Bensonhurst, an appalling number of the community responded with fury- not to the murder but to those who marched on the neighborhood to protest it...
...Following a mild insult to a young, married white woman, Emmett Till was shot in the head by two white men and thrown into the Tallahatchie River...
...demand for cocaine, it seems, is helping to deplete the earth's ozone layer and to suffocate the globe...
...Bensonhurst is the business of us all...
...and periodic uprisings that have been answered by unsuccessful efforts at economic reform...
...But they are being stymied in their efforts by the lack of food storage space in Poland...
...But there will come a moment-perhaps not far off- when debt restructuring, direct aid, and investment will be needed and they must be given generously and quickly...
...Suite 710...
...Renew America, a nonprofit environmental education organization, has come up with an antidote to the problem of citizen numbness...
...A recent experiment, concerned with religious rather than political pluralism, may offer a model...
...CARDINAL GLEMP Perhaps the lesson of pluralism needs most to be taught to the Primate of Poland...
...for though Poland is a society that has appropriated the riches of its past to create a stirring present, it has a long way to go to meld its traditions with a viable future...
...His mother, Mamie Bradley, had warned the black teen-ager how to behave in the South: "If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly...
...The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan are responding cautiously to the political shift in Poland...
...but a brief comment is necessary...
...The fragile peace of the civic order must be nursed along by Lech Walesa who remains head of Solidarity...
...Hard choices lie ahead for the new government, for Solidarity, and for Polish workers...
...The fifty-year interval has seen the wartime devastation of the Polish people, including the annihilation of virtually its entire Jewish population...
...In fact, the new government can perhaps use potential Western help as leverage in the continuing struggle with the bureaucrats and the Communist party...
...That is prudent until the political jousting produces a stable government prepared to make hard economic choices and, more important, implement them...
...The winning programs will serve as models or as catalysts to stimulate new approaches or solutions to specific environmental problems...
...Her young son failed to heed her warnings...
...No one is rushing to provide the economy with the financial infusions it desperately needs...
...It is not...
...The murder of Emmett Till brought about some remarkable changes...
...September 1,1989, Poland's new prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki and his colleagues in Solidarity are negotiating to bring a new government into being...
...the other is all white...
...PUBLICIZING WHAT WORKS Have you heard that farmers are destroying thousands of acres of Peru's rain forests in order to plant fields of coca...
...There, in Bensonhurst, replying to an ad for a used car, Yusuf Hawkins was murdered-in cold blood, after he had begged for mercy-"because," in the words of the Village Voice, "he was black and because he had tripped the wire of someone's manhood...
...The bigotry of those whites who reviled the marchers protesting Yusuf Hawkins's murder must be vigorously challenged, just as the agendas of the Al Sharptons and the Louis Farrakhans must not go uncontested...
...Poland's precipice September 1,1939, Hitler invaded Poland...
...On June 20, Judge O'Neill issued a detailed remedial order outlining the steps the club must take, including inviting several specific families, including ours, to join...
...Lansdowne is in no way unique, not a novel relic of the past...
...Two months ago," she told an audience in Cleveland, "I had a nice apartment in Chicago, a good job, a son...
...On May 17, 1989, Federal District Judge Thomas O'Neill ruled that the pool 'has engaged in a widespread pattern or practice of discrimination against blacks from its inception to the present.' He also ruled that the swim club was not private and therefore was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...
...Mazowiecki and the new Polish parliament must work to gain control of the bureaucracy...
...In August 1989, another promising young man, sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins, journeyed by train into a distant land...
...Awards will be presented in Washington, D.C...
...Fifty-four members of Congress, twenty-one environmental organizations, and key governors are sponsoring the effort to publish an Environmental Success Index of workable programs in categories such as air pollution reduction, drinking water protection, energy pollution control, food safety, forest management, hazardous materials reduction and recycling, transportation efficiency, and so on-categories that can be used as a reference guide by policymakers, the media, public interest organizations, and citizens...
...But neither have they been the occasions for casting off their oppressors...
...Before Emmett Till's murder," wrote Anne Moody in her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, "I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil...
...But then, how integrated is your local parish, and when did you last hear a sermon on the topic...
...Do the Western democracies have anything else to offer...
...This story is one of many that can leave people feeling hopeless-resigned, apathetic-about the planet's survival...
...In Mississippi, not only had a man been lynched but a white jury refused to convict his murderers...
...ET CETERA A POOL OPENS James T. Ryan writes: "This is a postscript to my article, 'What Would Our Children Think of Us?' (February 24), describing the efforts to integrate a swimming pool in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania...
...The leader of Roman Catholics in Poland will need very quickly to learn the charity and restraint appropriate to church officials in a more democratic Poland...
...Certain kinds of technical specialists in food distribution, engineering, and communications could provide hands-on, expert help in building the country's infrastructure...
...Stone called the forces of tribalism...
...Both murders demonstrated the fierce vitality of what I.F...
...But the sorry state of the Polish economy will sorely test that achievement...
...The complex issues surrounding the debate over the convent at Auschwitz and the ensuing international controversy are discussed in detail by John Pawlikowski, beginning on page 485, and need not be repeated here...
...It proved to be his last...
...Washington, D.C...
...The director of Polish television has announced that loyal Communists "would fight for every inch of influence...
...That same fear is evident in Devin Standard's recent op-ed article in the New York Times (September 2...
...The murder has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all...
...The Polish genius for political persistence has triumphed...
...Cardinal Glemp's unconscionable anti-Semitic remarks at Czestochowa, his lack of compassion for Jewish feelings about the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, and his want of respect for the four cardinals who signed the accords that at one point peacefully resolved this painful conflict, evoke memories of Poland's sad history...
...1400 16th St...
...The miracle of the present moment-that Solidarity has succeeded against all odds in breaking the Communist party's monopoly over the government-should be celebrated...
...The U.S...
...A cabinet full of non-Communists cannot hope to run a government administration dominated by the Communist nomenklatura...
...The obstacles are not hard to illustrate: currently Western European countries are trying to send supplies of meat and grains to be sold on the open market, with the proceeds to be invested in distribution networks...
...None of these events has ever finally crushed the spirit of the Polish people...
...Pool officials announced they would like to appeal the ruling, but do not have the funds to do so...
...Applications are being accepted now (Renew America...
...The solidarity of the Polish workers, fanners, intellectuals, and the Catholic church in the struggle against the Communists has been remarkable, and there is no gainsaying the democratic spirit that has suffused that struggle...
...Until the production and control of fertilizers and farm equipment are loosened from the grip of the bureaucracy, there will be shortages and food lines, and with these a heart-numbing cynicism about the new government...
...Mazowiecki's first appearance in Gdansk shouted, "We need bread, not a prime minister...
...In the North, Till's mother began speaking in city after city...
...In the face of oppression many factions were able to achieve cohesion...
...His murderers were tried but never convicted...
...No matter that Bensonhurst is only at the other end of the subway line from his home in Brooklyn...
...the destruction of its cities and pillaging of its countryside...
...But now there was a new fear known to me-the fear of being killed just because I was black...
...There will be bouts of serious unemployment as Poland adjusts to a freer internal market and tries to find its place in an increasingly specialized international economy...
...But ultimately the unity dictated by resistance to a common enemy must give way to a diversity of visions-the necessary consequence of political freedom but a possible source of endless squabbles...
...20036...
...American colleges and universities, especially Catholic ones, might develop on-site, crash management courses for the new businesspeople and the new bureaucrats that Poland will need...
...The results in both cases were devastating, not only for Hawkins and Till, their families, and the murderers, but for their neighborhoods and the nation as well...
...In the meantime, other practical measures could be devised...
...When something happened to Negroes in the South I said, 'That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong I was...
...Hecklers at Mr...
...This may seem far removed from the current crisis in Poland...
...What needs to be emulated now is the resolve of Mamie Bradley, the compassion of Elizabeth Galarza (the Bensonhurst woman who ran to the dying Hawkins and held him in her arms), and the insight of Governor Mario Cuomo who, at the funeral, called Yusuf Hawkins "our child," "the son of the whole city...
...Now that they are free to compete, the question is whether they can quarrel their way to a working consensus...
...He might begin by apologizing to the Jewish community and to his fellow cardinals, and then quickly proceed to provide the Carmelites with their new convent...
...Neighboring Yeadon, for example, has two pools: one is predominantly black, although whites have always been accepted...
...In fact, Poland needs both a new government and a new economic order...
...the postwar imposition of a Communist regime...
...I am twenty-four years old, a graduate of an elite college....Yet I cannot walk throughout the city in which I was born without fearing for my safety-just because I am an African-American...
...It galvanized blacks in the South and three months later the Montgomery bus boycott was inaugurated...
...Its "Searching for Success" campaign seeks to identify, then to reward, successful environmental programs and policies in place in the U.S...
...citizens' groups, businesses, universities, and government are eligible...
...They should alert Catholics, in particular, to the insidious ways in which past sins contaminate the present and future unless they are rooted out and exorcised...
...This is 1989," he writes...
...Cardinal Glemp, in part, complains that the Jewish objections to the convent at Auschwitz and the agreement to move it are an infringement on Polish sovereignty...
...Thirty-four years separate these two events-years of advance and regression, of leadership and the lack of it, of compassion and its failures...
...In a program sponsored this summer in Chicago by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the Polish bishops, and Spertus College of Judaicia, twenty-two Polish seminary professors were engaged in intense study of Judaism as well as experiencing first-hand American religious pluralism...
...Though the economic tasks are daunting and the political balancing act unprecedented, the last decade of Poland's history has taught the skeptical outsider that the impossible isn't...
...THE BUSINESS OF US ALL In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till journeyed by train from Chicago for his first visit to relatives in Mississippi...
...Nor in the midst of these military and political struggles have the Poles been able to rechannel the remarkable energies that have helped them to resist nazism, communism, and sovietization into economic efforts that will feed and sustain a hungry and demoralized population...
...The lack of infrastructure-roads, storage facilities, and distribution systems-stands between Poland's productive agricultural sector and its hungry people...
...Polish farmers, who have long since cut back on flocks and herds, have little meat to sell even at the new higher unregulated prices...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 16
