Page:Minority of One February 1961.pdf/10
America has become a country in which the joy of creation has been submerged in a universal system of relationships in which everyone is trying to take advantage of everyone.
It is symptomatic of a degenerated attitude towards one's calling that so many of our physicians, for instance, are as great stock market experts as they are medical experts. Why should a man involved in as social a profession as that of the physician, who by virtue of his professional work alone is gaining material comfort still be interested in sheer financial speculation? Would he be that greedy had he derived the full mental satisfaction his profession potentially offers? Or is it, that even though he has taken the Hippocratic Oath. he is still first and foremost a businessman, his medical practice being his equivalent of the shopkeeper's merchandise? In his stock market speculations. isn't he resorting to the same occupational infidelity as the mechanic who charges you even for time in which he performed no service for you? The widespread and humiliating practice of tipping is another symptom of people who are missing the satisfactions of creating and earning.
One must contrast our chiseling attitude towards work with the meaningful work concept in many other societies, in Germany for instance. Tell the German cobbler, plumber, carpenter or mechanic that his work is acceptable and satisfactory to you before it is acceptable and satisfactory to him, and you stand little chance of having the product released to you. His pride of creating won't let him cheat you even when you prove to be gullible or indifferent. Or attempt to pay him more for his work than he estimated was due him, and you will have insulted him. Because he is not there to grab money from you but to EARN it, and by offering him more than he believes he has earned you put him in a beggar's category. (If you were in Europe and had experiences that seemed to contradict this characterization. most probably you should ascribe them to "coca-colonization", to borrow a recently coined phrase.)
Even if no other fault could be found in American life. this alone would suffice to account for a most unenviable degree of general demoralization and social perversion. What is shocking is that this perversion of values has been imposed by a small group of people upon a nation that has only so recently known the spirit of pioneering, its challenges and rewards.
THE SOCIAL DAMAGE
Yet, basically Americans are no different from all other people. They share with all of humanity a potential for virtue and a potential for demoralization. It is not the American individual who is in any way inferior to other individuals, but the social machine that regulates his life and establishes his changeable psychological responses. Never before in history have the benefits of the few derived from the damages to so many; never before has the status quo depended upon such universal dehumanization.
From the disillusioning revelations of a Kinsey all the way to our international policies the effects are felt we are a nation no longer in love with work, a nation deprived of the healing and dignifying joy of creation. Of course. exertion is still with us and we have not yet discovered how to accumulate money completely without it. but it has become like the hated, frustrating, annoying wife to whom one is bound by enslaving bonds rather than love.
There is a definite and mutual influence among a nation's economic, political and cultural practices. One was sadly reminded of this co-relation when, during the aforementioned prosecution of the electrical manufacturers, the fourth largest American corporation in sales. the General Electric Company, emerged in a triple role: as a swindler, as a direct political power and as a pimp. In addition to its price-fixing swindles, it has been established that the company was supplying prostitutes to customers as well as an advisor to former President Eisenhower-Ralph Cordiner, who, in addition to being the corporation's chief executive officer, served as the chairman of the Business Advisory Council.
It would be very important and highly interesting were someone to conduct a Kinsey-type inquiry into Americans' attitude to- wards their work. How many people would he find that are satisfied and content with their trades. professions and business pursuits? What would be the percentage of the frustrated. dissatisfied and disgusted? How do the frustrations they encounter in their professional activities affect the remainder of their lives and activities? How do their frustrating work relationships affect their other human relationships? How do they affect the cultural patterns of different groups and those of the entire nation? It may be impossible to guess the statistical details of the results of such an inquiry but it is more than a guess that the overall picture would be very, very bleak.
The price we as a nation are paying for our unwholesome concept of work is immense. Young people hardly ever search themselves for their true professional aptitude: they know their work need not be the work of love. Instead, their inquiry into themselves is concerned with nothing but the field in which they have the greatest earning capacity. In addition to all the damage to the individual, as a people we are becoming a nation of frustrates. Typical is the man who, holding his nose between his fingers. tries to make the most money out of work he is resigned not to otherwise enjoy. Untold reservoirs of ingenuity, energy and enthusiasm are lost to the nation and the reflection of that depravity is quite tangible in what is becoming of our national culture.
== The Junior's Minority ==
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A Call to Youth
By Bill Henry
Does youth dare to practice the idealism of nonviolence? Ideas are on the march. Forces are abroad whose time has come. Youth are the receptacles of these ideas. They are able to bring unjust orders to an end. The past year has seen the passing away of the silent generation. Today the white cloaked phantom of race prejudice fears for its existence as never before. It joins with the other forces of darkness to stave off its own annihilation. "Error is wounded; it writhes with pain."
Youth leads in the battle because it is naive and inexperienced enough, foolish enough, to dare to superimpose starry-eyed ideals upon the facts of cold reality. Youth is prepared to give Itself for truth because it has not yet been bribed by wealth, comfort, fear and social pressure. Youth leads because it has only itself to give and so is able to give all. Youth is still tender to the injuries of injustice.
Around the world youthful idealists have grasped that complex of ideas which alone is able to keep civilization afloat. Today's whispering breeze of nonviolence is able to turn into a whirlwind of spiritual force. This nonviolence is "twice blest". It blesses him against whom it is used as well as him who uses it. The power of nonviolence is the ideal way, the loving way, the courageous way, the Christian way, and the truly effective way to oppose evil.
Men are born into a world containing both good and evil. In such a world life has a purpose. In such a world man is born into a struggle. In such a situation man can cease to struggle only at the risk of not really having lived. It is for this reason that bodies are created; it is for this reason that men are born: that they might seek out the truth and bear witness to it. Youth consciously and unconsciously bring new meaning into their lives as they present their bodies and their actions in efforts to achieve truth and justice. Gradually they learn that it is in heroism that life's mystery is hidden.
Youth is willing to "live dangerously" and to answer to the cry for heroes in the moral and spiritual realm. Youth, who do not divorce their beliefs from their actions, are in prisons today to achieve racial justice and universal disarmament. When others join them in fearless action the two greatest evils in our world can be defeated.
"There is one man in the world and his name is all men"; there is one religion in the world and its name is truth. Youth is able to rally to the support of this man in his religion. It proves itself able to produce the incredible effort which truth demands. The truly dedicated youth shows that he is not deterred by discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, depth upon depth of exertion, or even death. He discovers new energy and power and life more abundantly as he participates in the strenuous life of nonviolence. The soul truly dedicated to nonviolence can be unbribed and free from material things. Such a youth can pave his way by what he is and does rather than by what he has. He is prepared to fling away his life as a witness to truth for he is the moral fighting man.
God offers every human being the choice between truth and repose, but he cannot choose both. He who chooses repose may get comfort, ease, luxury and affluence, but he closes the door to truth. He who really chooses truth finds insecurity, truth, crisis, adventure and life more abundant. "Youth, sow in yourselves the seed of nonviolence, then 'sow yourselves, sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.'"
Bill Henry is a young pacifist. This appeal was written by him in the New Haven Jail, where he was held after boarding the Polaris missile submarine Ethan Allen, in protest against armaments,