"I Can't Help But Weep"

Sir: I am a college student, and I can't help but weep for my country. I look around and see my brothers gunned down in the streets. Our "leaders" persist in pursuing an unjust war, and yet the Great Silent Majority remains silent. What does it take to make people see that this country is on the brink of disaster?

GEORGE CRAWFORD Knoxville, Tenn.

Sir: From now on it will be easy to kill students, because no one will care. They will read of two of them shot, and it will not be as many as four; they will harden themselves to the shock value that Kent presented. As time passes they will forget or become immune to the reality as they have become immune to the slaughter in Viet Nam. They will present the same apathetic front that destroyed Germany in the '30s, and history will repeat itself.

LLOYD CHESLEY Toronto, Ont.

Sir: The most devastating comment was saved for the grand finale: "But no one informed the demonstrators that the troops had live ammunition. Nor were any warning shots fired." Goodness gracious and mercy, mercy. Even the most retarded demonstrator understands that guns are made to kill.

May Kent State Professor Charles Brill's statement, "My God, this is for real," ring throughout our nation. You bet your hippie wig it's for real. America is fed up with all of these violent demonstrators. What a great nation we'd have if just a fraction of this hostile energy could be transformed into efforts to assist the more unfortunate members of our country.

DAVID M. YOUNG, D.V.M. Department of Veterinary Pathology Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

Sir: If it is necessary to establish blame for the mess in which we find ourselves, it should be placed on us parents, who have abdicated the responsibility to give our children the direction they need. Many of our generation have gone on our selfish way, expecting our children to grow automatically into completely mature human beings. Then, when our young act like the non-adults that most of them legally are, we are completely shocked.

I feel that if we are to continue in Indochina, it should be a declared war, so that those who are so vociferously in favor of it can be actively engaged.

It is time we so-called adults accept our own responsibilities rather than to expect it to be a Children's Crusade.

(MRS.) CATHERINE HUGHES Missoula, Mont.

Sir: The father of one of the Kent State victims is quoted as asking: "Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her Government?" No one has been shot in this country for disagreeing with the actions of the Government. Persons have been killed and injured, however, for participating in riots and demonstrations involving violence. Certainly the events at Kent State were tragic, but I cannot share TIME'S outrage that the National Guardsmen had loaded rifles. Is it not about time that the Black Panthers, Weathermen, professional agitators, and even college students realize that fomenting deliberate violence carries with it the risk of personal injury?

DALE M. SCHULZ, M.D. Indianapolis

Sir: All this sympathy, politically motivated and other, lavished on persons hurt while engaged in rock-throwing disorder reminds me of a jingle well known in my teen age some 65 or 70 years ago:

Little Willie choked his sister. She was dead before they missed her. Willie's always up to tricks. Ain't he cute and only six?

FRED D. DYSINGER Round Pond, Me.

Sir: Opposition to any duly elected government's acts can come only from those who have elected it and feel their mandate has been misinterpreted. And even they--men and women of age and position --cannot take it upon themselves to claim they are the majority just because they clog squares and streets.

STEVE STRICKLAND Athens, Greece

Sir: Youth the hope of our country? I think they will be its downfall. Sign me: Under 30 but not understanding.

SARA JOHNSON Falkville, Ala.

Sir: It is appropriate to review Mr. Nixon's acceptance speech of Aug. 8, 1968:

"When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for years in a war in Vist Nam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can't manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued with unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation that has been known for a century of equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence, and when the President of the U.S. cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration, then it's time for new leadership in America!"

WARREN H. RAAB Dover, Pa.

Unconscious Symbolism

Sir: You say in your Essay that the protest generation has yet to produce good literature [May 18]. Our geniuses today chant their poetry behind electric guitars and blaring amplifiers. They have deliberately, if not consciously, chosen media that the Establishment does not hear or understand. That way their messages come through unwarped and uncensored. The 19th century Russian poets and novelists did the same thing in order to bypass a deaf and irrelevant Establishment.

Today's revolutionary literature is at once obscurely symbolic and as clear as a thunderclap to those who care to listen. TIME does not hear it because it is not intended for you to hear.

LINDA MACDONAI.D San Francisco

Sir: I marvel that you could write a full-page Essay about protesters, who despair of making themselves heard, without mentioning the most obvious point: we did hear their bleats. We heard, man. we heard that Bobby Seale is just a spirited kid being imposed upon, that the Chicago Seven were just fun-loving kids out for a lark, that Gene McCarthy's policy of precipitate flight from Viet Nam is best, that the Nixon Administration is a fascist dictatorship, that students own the universities and are entitled to burn them down at will, that Che Guevara was a public benefactor, etc. ad nauseam. We heard it, we heard it. We don't believe it.

WARREN SNYDER Chicago

Sir: If the American Revolution had a Tom Paine and the French Revolution a Voltaire, then our liberal, existential "revolution" of the '60s has had an overabundance of articulate people.

But their names were John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That inarticulate rage should fill the vacuum is not really surprising.

JERRY DYER York. Pa.

Sons and Brothers

Sir: I support President Nixon's move into Cambodia [May 18]. 1 support it because more than two years ago my brother was killed in South Viet Nam by the Viet Cong. His murderers then took refuge in Cambodia to strike again against someone else's son and brother.

W. LAIRD JENKINS Graduate Student Utah State University Logan. Utah

Sir: We are taught from childhood that one of the evil tenets of Communism is that the end justifies the means. Is it not ironic that the right-wingers are using this same doctrine to justify President Nixon's unrequested incursion into Cambodia?

ERIC FORSYTHE Tenafly, N.J.

Sir: When one group attempts to take liberty and freedom from others, the whole world is threatened. The freedoms of the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Laotians are just as relevant as the freedoms of the Czechoslovaks, the Hungarians and the Israelis. When we turn our backs on these people when they are losing their freedom, we lose a little of our own. Worst of all, we become traitors to mankind.

HAROLD G. CUTLER Major, U.S.A.F. Washington. Utah

Sir: Perhaps if every kid eligible to die in Southeast Asia put the heat on good ol' Mom and Dad, the middle-aged block of ice could be thawed a little. Even though Abraham was determined to carry out God's command and knife his own son to death, I don't think most parents would share the same degree of devotion. The concept of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public telling their son to go risk his life in a war situation (a situation few parents could adequately explain) because Nixon says so seems absurd.

JERRY SCHOENDORF Cali, Colombia

Devoted to the Standards

Sir: Contrary to the report that "a group of Kissinger's old Harvard colleagues, including Edwin Reischauer and Adam Yarmolinsky, told him in effect that unless the Administration's policies change or Kissinger resigns, he will not be welcome back at Harvard" [May 18], in our meeting with Mr. Kissinger we did not state or imply anything about his return to Harvard. To have done so would have been an unthinkable violation of the standards of academic freedom to which all of us are deeply devoted. Nothing that has happened leads us to think that Mr. Kissinger is other than a distinguished scholar and teacher.

We should point out that Professor Reischauer was not able to be present at the meeting to which your story refers although he is a member of our group.

FRANCIS M. BATOR KONRAD E. BLOCK WILLIAM M. CAPRON GERALD HOLTON GEORGE B. KISTIAKOWSKY SEYMOUR M. LIPSET ERNEST R. MAY RICHARD E. NEUSTADT EDWIN O. REISCHAUER THOMAS C. SCHELLING MICHAEL L. WALZER FRANK H. WESTHEIMER ADAM YARMOLINSKY Cambridge, Mass.

> TIME erred in stating that Professor Reischauer was at the meeting; he intended to go, but another commitment kept him in Boston. However, our Washington Bureau stands by its report of the session with Mr. Kissinger.

Therapy Down Under

Sir: Hurrah for the dawning of the age of enlightenment in the troubled conjugal bed [May 25]. Your account of the valuable sexplorations being carried out by Researchers Masters and Johnson fascinated me--particularly as you used my name for your hypothetical case history.

Harry Miller is my true name. Feel free to continue using it if it will help to do anything to unknot anyone's sexual hang-ups, particularly those of the Australian censors. Allow me, though, to make it quite clear that I do not, personally, have any problems in that area. Sure, I've got Hair on my hands, but not the imaginary sprouts of adolescent uncertainties. My Australian production of the show is just a year old and still, so to speak, holding up magnificently. And down here in wowserland that's real deep-penetration therapy.

HARRY M. MILLER Harry M. Miller Attractions Pty. Ltd. Sydney, Australia

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.