Your conversation with David Brooks resurrected old figures and events and then I realized I am 20 years older than either of you so while you two were toddling about I was in high school 100 miles away from Montgomery during the King-led bus boycott. My contribution to the 60s rise of freedom was engaging in the first legal Black/White marriage in Arizona – 1964 when you all were fresh in the world. I was born in the middle of the New Deal and on the cusp of a world-changing war. I am not sure those of us on the left (my colleagues in a high school social studies department dubbed me a radical…. because I voted for Democrats!) were overall so captured by whiffs of Marxism and Leftism because we did not remain stuck for long as life hit us. My liberal senses were shaken when I mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki to my dad and his response was, “Whew, boy was I happy;” he had been poised on the coast of China for the invasion of Japan – different perspective.
My retraining has included reading conservative authors but I’m late to the game because you and Brooks don’t sound like the conservatives of my day and the GOP today is nothing Everett Dirkson would recognize nor Moynihan. Clinton Rossiter stunned me with his warning that the surge of the Negro will be an ordeal by fire for conservatives but something must be done. The Russian revolutionaries asked chto delat’? What’s to be done? Mass defenestration would deal with any reemergence from the surface of the waters to claim new victims but is unlikely. The mistake made in 1865 that led to a 100 year fascist terror state in the South (my wife as a child witnessed the violence) must be rectified by accountability, not vengeance.
But before we bemoan our moral collapse I would refer you to a Homeric Greek grammar, not for philosophy but as a caution because the one I have sets an epigraph at the head of each chapter consisting of a quote from a famous American concerning young people. The quotes routinely strike a forboding note for the future of our country. The feckless youth of the day went on to become The Greatest Generation that set our country on a course to world leadership in every way. Who would have thought that our descent into autocracy would be thwarted by the people of Minneapolis? Walter Lippman is one of those quoted decrying the trend to judge right and wrong by what we feel, our emotions; no, for me and my friends it was what is fair and just and works for the common good – no reference to Integralism intended. So we do not know our strength until it is tested and apparently that’s about right now. To the Barricades!
Patrick Barrett
1957 E. Victoria St.
Chandler, AZ. 85249
602-290-2072