THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Bertrand Russell Dear Sirs: The deaths of eminent persons disrupt our mental landscapes in vastly different ways. The Kennedys' assassinations dispelled the faint euphoria of...
...In the election of 1968, I believe Robert F. Kennedy would have won had he not been assassinated...
...When the future does not belong to the young, there is no future...
...It severs our last living link with a rare and genteel civilization, a generation of intellectual geniuses whose brilliance rivaled the classic Athenians...
...No wonder the students I recommended The Progressive to four years ago still read it, from Minneapolis to Swaziland...
...If we are not very careful, we could be a part of the problem...
...We can expect the people to take that cynical position as long as many of the leaders of the Democratic Party take a contemptible "me too" stand on the great issues...
...I referred primarily to our emphasis on prepaid group practice systems and other types of organized efforts to provide comprehensive care...
...Max W. Fine Executive Director Committee for National Health Insurance Washington, D.C...
...These words by Senator Gaylord Nelson in The Progressive ("Our Polluted Planet," November, 1969) tell a truth and reveal a frustration which few elders understand...
...Moreover, our elders should not be surprised nor reassured by the fact that youth is concerned...
...In our attempts to be heard we are beaten down with physical force or told that our demonstrations will have no effect...
...It is most interesting to note in that same poll that when asked which of the two parties can better handle the big problems, those who made a choice divided almost evenly, but the largest proportion of people, thirty-nine per cent, saw no difference between the two political parties...
...Is it enough for today...
...The question is precipitated by my comment that our plan would "preserve a good many things" to avoid polarization of opinion...
...Wilfred H. Baker Morgantown, West Virginia Progressive Salt Dear Sirs: I have long wanted to write you a fan letter, but postponed it, only to be reminded of it again in digging through old issues of The Progressive while researching a vital issue...
...Our Party leaders have been too quick and too cowardly in surrendering to President Nixon on the most important issue of this generation...
...It strikes me that this does pose one serious problem for liberals: What about the 1970 and the 1972 elections...
...its salt retains its savor even as the pages begin to yellow...
...More than most, his death again reminds us, as Russell wrote more than sixty-six years ago, that "no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave...
...Lost Decade Dear Sirs: This is to express appreciation for the quarterly essays by Hal Borland from his Connecticut farm, and his usually precise comments with regard to seasons and time...
...Really, the quality of the magazine remains high...
...Eugene McCarthy is a great man, but he is an enigma to the American public in general...
...John Fredell Nioro du Rip Senegal West Africa National Health Insurance Dear Sirs: Erwin Knoll's article, "The Coming Struggle for National Health Insurance," in your December issue concluded: "The 'Reuther Plan', it seems clear, is the system of national health insurance that the United States should have adopted twenty, forty, or sixty years ago...
...We all have friends who said during the 1968 campaign that there was really no difference between Hubert Humphrey and Nixon...
...The youth of America today charge its leaders with the responsibility to cultivate this concern with positive action because there is a real danger that youth's belief that something might yet be done and youth's willingness to support established institutions will be early victims of our polluted environment...
...If the Democratic Party can attack the policy obliquely by attacking the economic and social consequences, it can carry the peace movement automatically and furnish those who have a hangup about being called cowardly or unpatriotic a ready-made out...
...The January, 1970, issue, with the letters from the GI in Vietnam, Paul Dickson on Ralph Nader, and James A. Wechsler on President Nixon, was particularly good...
...That will not be achieved by starting a third party...
...Ending the war without further serious political damage will be difficult at best...
...However, I do believe he lost a decade in the last sentence of "Year's End" in the January issue...
...Some of us emphatically believe that the major problem is to find a way to return Richard M. Nixon to private life...
...William H. Fisher Missoula, Montana Concerned Youth Dear Sirs: "The real loser in man's greedy drive is the youth of this country and the world...
...I wonder how many of them still feel that way...
...The Coalition can still speak out independently, but let's not try to force the vulnerable candidates to commit political suicide by insisting they be all-out advocates of the policy we believe in...
...Young people have been growing up for the past two decades sentenced to death by the greed of which Senator Nelson speaks...
...And liberals had better be thinking over this point pretty carefully before they get on some ill-advised third party bandwagon...
...CNHI believes that the program we will offer meets the national health needs of the 1970s, not the 1940s...
...The end of 1969 (more properly 1970) would be at the end of the seventh decade of the Twentieth Century, A.D., rather than the sixth...
...But I hope that you will continually force us to prove it...
...The last Gallup Poll on this subject, which I saw in the Chicago Sun-Times in February, showed that twice as many Americans felt that Vietnam was our most important problem as those who picked the high cost of living as the number one issue...
...If President Nixon is going to use dem-agoguery to imply that those who oppose his policy wish to humiliate our country and Hubert Humphrey joins him, it is going to take a lot of subtlety to defeat that combination...
...I think we should get behind George McGovern and see if we can win...
...Clarence Barker Burrton, Kansas No Third Party Dear Sirs: James Wechsler's article, "President Nixon: One Year Later," in the January issue is, as usual, an excellent one...
...The murder of Martin Luther King blasted a familiar moral rock out of the foreground, leaving an ugly, gaping hole littered with mangled dreams...
...Preserving (and expanding) group practice has no relationship to preserving the present fragmented, wasteful, inefficient, ineffective, semi-functional non-system...
...Nixon...
...Martha Brandt-Erichsen Solvang, California Prudent Vietnam Politics Dear Sirs: It seems the editor of The Progressive shows a lack of political sophistication in the February lead editorial when he berates the Democratic leadership for not making an overt issue of the Vietnam war...
...The nation appears to be doing everything in its power to execute the sentence and deny us our future...
...Michael D. True Worcester, Massachusetts...
...The Kennedys' assassinations dispelled the faint euphoria of early spring with sudden blasts of Arctic chill and the threat of perpetual winter, as if the snow had lingered into July...
...No intelligent liberal can any longer be fooled by the President's rhetoric...
...He does not speak the language of the people as Bobby Kennedy did and as McGovern does...
...J. C. Finney Evanston, Illinois McGovern for President Dear Sirs: In your editorial in the February issue, "The Democrats: at Peace with the War," there was a note of despair in which the feeling was expressed that the Democrats have no candidate who could possibly oppose Mr...
...It is natural that anyone whose existence is threatened becomes concerned...
...It would be more forthright and emotionally satisfying to us in the peace movement to meet the issue head-on, but there is still the question of whether it would be politically prudent in terms of accomplishing the goal we seek...
...When a supposedly responsible newspaper like The Christian Science Monitor prints a cartoon showing the Moratorium Movement twisting the Government's arm to force it to accept a supposedly bad peace, it seems unrealistic to think we could achieve a majority in a direct confrontation...
...I wonder where the Democratic spokesmen get the idea Vietnam is no longer a major issue...
...I think there is one in Senator George McGovern...
...We young Americans are sent to die in Southeast Asia, we live daily with the threat of nuclear devastation, and our lives are being suffocated in a sea of pollution while our elders tell us of all the sacrifices they have made for us and that no generation has been as fortunate as we...
...No difference" is what they said...
...To say that this makes growing up difficult is to understate grossly the gravity of the situation...
...Wechsler makes it abundantly clear that in practically all ways it is still the same old Nixon who "redbaited" Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jerry Voorhis out of public life...
...Bertrand Russell's death removes a distant mountain, an alien scenic survivor from a past geological epoch seen through the distant mists far across the political desert...
...When will liberals ever learn this lesson...
...C. W. Griffin Denville, New Jersey 'Me Too' Democrat Leaders Dear Sirs: I am a life-long Democrat but I concur heartily in your February issue editorial, "The Democrats: at Peace with the War...
Vol. 34 • March 1970 • No. 3
