REFLECTIONS AT EIGHTY

...It is to be forgiven, perhaps it is to be expected, on an occasion like this, that a man of eighty should turn his memory back to younger days and contrast the world and its problems, as they seemed to him then, with the problems of our present time...

...For a time, it may be delayed by a balance of terror...

...It must include China, whose intransigence has been stiffened by our refusal to recognize the facts of the political situation in Southeast Asia...

...Now, let us consider Vietnam...

...Ours is a time of great intellectual and spiritual malaise...

...Any halfway decent settlement must be political...

...and (3) the abandonment of our notion that we Americans are wise enough and strong enough to play God's policeman by the devil's means of war all around the world...

...It is capable of evolution...

...The years of my youth, from the turn of the century up to the first world war, were in America years of hope and a great faith in Progress, with a capital P. We knew that many things were wrong and must be changed...

...They have left us under the curse of a situation in which a world, two-thirds of whose population live on a narrow margin between hunger and starvation, is spending more than $120 billion annually on military establishments incapable of giving us the security which we seek by recklessly piling up weapons of absolute destruction...

...We can, before long, have a society which may be motivated by the Marxist (and may I add Christian...

...In the more advanced nations, what will take the place of the discipline of work necessary for existence...

...A truly secure and lasting peace will also require a holy and cooperative war against the bitter poverty, illiteracy, and disease which curse so much of the earth...

...Rather I want to thank you all for helping me to learn that mutual respect, and, something more, a real and true friendship can bless us even when on important matters we cannot see eye to eye...

...to every man according to his need...

...It has its values...

...Here we face two fundamental facts: The first, that at last men, at least here in the fortunate United States, can escape our immemorial condemnation to some form of an economy of scarcity...

...principle: "From every man according to his ability...

...You will truthfully say that we cannot discuss peace without reference to an aggressive, totalitarian Communism, which, like the maintenance of white supremacy in Mississippi, sanctifies any means to the achievement of its ends...

...President Johnson with his political skill can save us from a present shame, and a probable future catastrophe, by at once negotiating a cease-fire to be followed by a conference, through the United Nations or the powers that signed the Geneva Pact of 1954, or both, for a settlement that cannot possibly be as bad or as hurtful to our nation, a leader of democracy, as would be a continuation of the present war, to say nothing of its expansion...

...I strongly deplore our military intervention in that country's civil war...

...To do this adequately is impossible in the compass of one relatively short speech...

...Thomas' speech acknowledging the tributes accorded him.—The Editors Once more let me put on the record my knowledge that I have been one of the fortunate of life...

...This dangerous disparity between our achievements in science and technology on the one hand, and in our culture and social institutions on the other, is peculiarly manifest in three all important areas...

...We are not defending a government possessed of any stability...

...Remember, machines can't strike...

...Meanwhile, we face the immediate problem of the inexcusable poverty of at least one-fifth of our brothers and sisters in this most affluent society...

...We are on the road to breeding ourselves into misery...

...They also want to live...

...But the possibility of an economy of abundance, not dependent upon abundance of jobs, raises serious problems...

...We shall not win a true and desirable racial integration unless we can deal with the inequalities of employment for our Negro fellow citizens, already penalized by our past discriminations and injustice, when we are confronted with a steady loss of jobs at the foot and lower rungs of the economic ladder because of cybernetics...

...We, imperfectly rational men, dare not apathetically accept the tragedies inherent in a population explosion, itself largely the creation of our sense of the value of human life and our victories in war against disease...

...that I have paid no such price for service to the causes in which I believe as has been paid by hundreds of unknown or little known soldiers of peace, justice, civil rights, and the war against poverty and exploitation...

...It is not a valid choice in our age when liberty cannot float serenely among the survivors of nuclear war, which President Kennedy once said might cost 300,000,000 lives in the first hour...

...Opponents of the planned parenthood and birth control so essential for any decent future of mankind, who tell us that we have no right to interfere with God or nature, should remember how extensively and humanely we have interfered with the death rate...

...That such friendship is possible has given me courage to believe that our struggle for fraternity in this harsh and often so cruel a world is not in vain...

...These three are the requirements of a peace of coexistence...

...I shall, therefore, refer only to the most impressive of the differences that time has brought...

...This, among other things, will require appropriations for building homes, hospitals, and schools on the magnitude of our appropriations for the cold war, and it will require a kind of planning as intense as, and more difficult than, that which bestowed on humanity that weapon of collective suicide, the atomic bomb...

...As people, they, certainly the Russians, want war no more than we do...

...In this lack of correspondence I find one cause for the spiritual malaise to which our literature, and to some extent our music and our art, bear emphatic witness...

...We shall either correspondingly seek controls over the birth rate or resign ourselves to a new round of controls by war and disease...

...To place your bulk order, or for additional details, please write to the School Department, The Progressive, Madison, Wisconsin...

...We are not defending democracy in a country where, during our intervention, an unprecedented religious war has been added to the people's woes...

...The prerequisites for a peace of coexistence which must be possible if we are to live are: (1) universal disarmament down to a police level, under (2) stronger controls than the United Nations now affords, controls increasingly able to give us law in place of war...

...If there were time, I should like to discuss with you the immediate program laid down in the Socialist Platform of 1964...

...The Progressive is happy to pay its respects to a great crmader by publishing Mr...

...Balances do not last in our passionate, irrational world...

...But Communism today is not a monolithic force dedicated to the proposition of inevitable war...

...In terms of self-knowledge and self-control and the adaptations of our social institutions to our needs, we have, in my lifetime, made some progress, but nothing to compare in progress toward an incredible degree of mastery of space...

...The struggle that will count most is in a superiority of democracy that we can demonstrate in word and deed...

...An economy based largely on construction is infinitely sounder and more productive of jobs than an economy based on military production under the control of a military-industrial elite...

...Some of you will say or think: But we must have the military economy for our security, and that brings me to the third area in which our scientific and technical achievements promise utter destruction unless we can find alternatives to that immemorial institution of organized murder which we call war...

...I have been especially fortunate in the friendship such as you have expressed which has greatly enriched my life...

...The reason is no sudden and general increase in the birth rate, but the decrease in the death rate...

...Neither socialism nor any other ism has all the answers, but the socialist approach to conscious control of production for the common good is absolutely essential...

...I shall content myself with emphasizing one essential element: that is, a total war against the slums that mar our America's beauty and disgrace our humanity...

...But I would not be myself if, speaking to you as my life nears its close, I did not speak out on a matter which so deeply concerns me...

...Reflections at Eighty by NORMAN THOMAS Norman Thomas, who was six times the Socialist candidate for President, was honored recently on the occasion of his eightieth birthday at a dinner in New York sponsored by many hundreds of his friends and admirers...

...That I have learned this with your help, I count among my choicest blessings...

...How shall we develop democracy and democratic controls under an economy dominated by the makers, owners, and programmers of automated machines...

...It is man at his best, who has made such progress in sanitation, hygiene, medicine, and compassion for the ill and the handicapped, who has brought about this population explosion...

...and, second, that in this escape, made possible by cybernetics, we will destroy or seriously impair the old job-income nexus...

...First, in what we call the population explosion...

...But not forever...

...There is no more likely road to World War III...

...Our scientists and technicians have made us masters of power over natural forces and the world around us of which, not in my youth or much less in the milleni-ums which have gone before, the boldest man could have dreamed...

...But we thought that changes would more easily be effected by the reformist or revolutionary theories we espoused, and we could not have believed that wars of the magnitude and desperate cruelty of the first and second world wars were possible...

...It sprang out of war and defeat in war, and if any one can gain out of war it will be the Communists...

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...I realize that many of you may disagree with what I have said...

...In the past, men may have been forced to choose between war and slavery...

...We are not doing this as we should...

...The second dangerous disparity between our power to produce creatively arid our economic institutions and motivations is in the realm of what President Johnson has made it fashionable to call the war against poverty...

...I realize that this is not the time or place for a full discussion of foreign policy...

...The war on poverty cannot be won on the lines laid down by the Johnson Administration, valuable as its beginning may be...

...However well intentioned may have been our intervention, it has been a military failure and a moral disaster...

...But I do not wish these to be my concluding words on an occasion that means so much to me...

...How shall we stimulate creative and service motivation in coming generations...