Last, Not Lost

Sir: I am stunned by the keen insight that Gerald Clarke displayed in analyzing the psyche of our generation [June 29]. He placed our entrails on the table and read the signs with uncanny accuracy. He spoke to me, and I am reeling from the effect. However, we have never been a I "lost" generation, silent perhaps but not lost. We are the last generation to have found any foothold at all in this slippery world.

RABBI RONALD MILLSTEIN Temple Beth El Laurelton, N.Y.

Sir: Your Essay fit like a cocoon. Too often I've said: "I'm young enough to understand, but too old to go along."

MARILYN HARTMANN MORRIS Aliquippa, Pa.

Sir: If our only role is to be a bridge, then we must recognize that it is a painful role, because bridges are made to be walked on. I believe that my generation has the courage to accept the challenge and bear the pain; I certainly hope that we have the will, since the usual reason a bridge exists is that it is the only way to the other side.

Thank you for telling us publicly, Mr. Clarke, that "we now have a reason to speak." Our silence was a youthful luxury that we can no longer afford. (THE REV.) BENJAMIN J. RUSSELL, O.P. Aquinas Institute River Forest, 111.

Sir: Hell, I like being thirty! Anonymous living here in the middle is, after all, the highest kind of freedom. We don't require that the world jump either one way or the other. Nor does the world expect much of us. We may make choices that were closed to our parents by circumstances and to the younger set by rigid, rigid conformity.

It seems to occur to nobody that absolute freedom is found best by being nobody in particular.

D. TYRONE TILLSON Carnation, Wash.

Sir: How could a generation have "the luxury of growing up in peace and security," as you put it, while its fathers were dying in World War II? I know a lot of Korean veterans who probably wish they'd known on Pork Chop Hill in the '50s that they "were not expected to fight or die for our country."

Editor Clarke has his own special generation gap to worry about, between his 32 and my 37.

MARTHA M. ST. CLAIR Mobile, Ala.

Sir: In my heart, I cannot find it possible to forgive you for blowing our cover.

TOM SNYDER Cranford, N.J.

Views on the Voice

Sir: Vice President Agnew's request for the resignation of Joseph Rhodes Jr. [June 29] was absurd as well as hypocritical.

Agnew, if anyone these days, leads the list of American officials who are all talk and no action. It would seem that a man in such a position should exert more constructive physical initiative toward worth while goals instead of merely exercising his mandibles!

MICHELE PERRECONE Monterey, Calif.

Sir: For more than a generation the philosophies, ideals, dreams, hopes and aspirations of the left have been put forth as the law of the land. In tones that brooked no argument, we have been told the way we should think and react. And who was there to say nay?

But now one voice is speaking up in opposition to some of it. And have you ever heard such anguished alarm? To hear the left tell it, half of this nation has been driven underground, while the empty streets echo with the ring of bulllyboys' hobnails, the flail of sledges on presses, and the smoke from burning libraries pollutes the air.

But, really now, liberals, look around you; there's nothing to panic about. Don't you continue to have the unbridled use of the media, the rostrum, the campus? Surely you don't mind sharing a few columns on the front pages or a few moments on the television with the Vice President. Do you need to be reminded that freedom to speak out is a two-way street? Or that the Constitution guarantees you nothing that it doesn't guarantee to everybody else?

FRANK DOAK Ligonier, Pa.

No Thanks for the Memories

Sir: Congratulations to Major General Phillip Davidson Jr. and his merit system plan for army recruits [June 29].

As a graduate of Item Company, 93rd Infantry Division, Fort Ord, Calif., during the Korean War, I remember only too vividly the shock of transition from civilian to 'cruit. The digging of a hole 6 ft. by 6 ft. to bury a carelessly dropped cigarette butt, the dry shaving of some poor individual who forgot to shave that morning, the rousting out of the whole barracks at 3 a.m. by drunken cadre, and all the physical and mental harassment designed to break in the new soldier. It certainly wasn't conducive to fostering an attitude of wanting to fight and die for your country.

ROBERT BUNDY JOHNSON Mexico City

Nobody's Business

Sir: I protest the dismissal of Miss Angela Davis from the staff of U.C.L.A. [June 29]. It is just another notorious distortion of legality on the part of Reagan and his gang. One's political beliefs are like one's religion: none of anybody's business. This is just another attempt to deprive black people of their legal and social rights, no different from the brutal suppression of Black Panthers and the totally illegal action that deprived Muhammad Ali of his rightful place in the sports field.

ROBERT BURNELL JR. South Burlington, Vt.

Sir: As an individual, she is perfectly within her legal rights to be a member of the Communist Party in this country and --since she is of that ilk--to make off-campus inciting speeches and perform similar actions, as long as the latter are within the law. But that the average taxpayer of California should be asked to pay her salary as a teacher of his young is something I, for one, cannot stomach.

CECILY A. HALL Ojai, Calif.

Sir: I noticed an interesting contrast between Angela Davis, member of the Communist Party in the U.S., and Dr. Zhores Medvedev, Russian citizen. While Miss Davis uses the democratic protection of free speech to challenge her dismissal from U.C.L.A. on grounds of advocating Communism, Dr. Medvedev is being institutionalized for outspokenness by the very party she prefers to advocate.

MRS. CHARLES J. GUDAITIS New Britain, Conn.

Convinced, Not Converted

Sir: In your cover story on the British election, you say: "One opinion sampling showed that 67% of the population were convinced that Wilson would win [June 29]." Unlike the other polls mentioned in your article, however, this should never have been taken as a suggestion that the majority were about to vote for the Labor Party. An ardent Tory myself--prevented from voting because I am on holiday here--I was convinced that Wilson would win because I doubted the common sense of the British public as a whole. I wonder just how many of that 67% were like myself.

JANE FARRILL HESLOP Albuquerque

Sir: Anyone who has lived with an 18-year-old could have predicted the upset in the British election. Perhaps it's the job of youth to keep the established order off balance and on edge, but TIME errs in listing the young vote as conservative. It's more like a "who's in goes out" vote.

(MRS.) MARJORIE COMSTOCK Annandale, Va.

Sir: Due to the election of Enoch Powell, British George Wallace extraordinaire, the English had better stop the snotty comments about our race problems.

THOMAS L. TIPTON III Bellaire, Texas

Portraits of Polluters

Sir: The environmental artists [June 29] can't be real! They have closed their eyes to the exquisite beauty of natural phenomena and abused the landscape with their egotistical dalliances. In so doing, they have added to the grievous misuse of our environment. Their creations are self-portraits that portray man as a polluter--dumping massive doses of dye, burning gas and haphazardly inoculating sterile zones with microorganisms.

Jo ANNE MUELLER Evansville, Ind. ;

Sir: "Ecological" is a designation that occurred to these glib young opportunists at a very late stage. When Mr. Oppenheim sent out press releases and photographs of models of his works one or two years ago, there was no mention of ecology at all. As a matter of fact, it is reasonable to assume that his activities do more to upset the balance of nature than do anything positive for the environment. One might well ask how much small marine life was poisoned by the magenta dye which Mr. Oppenheim foolishly and recklessly released into a Caribbean cove. He should be fined for causing pollution. OTTO F. REISS

Publisher and Editor Art and Archaeology Newsletter Manhattan

Toward a Silent Spring

Sir: Last year I wrote to you concerning the near complete disappearance of our songbirds over the past three years. This fourth spring, still hoping I might have been mistaken or that the birds would have staged a comeback, however small, I watched again. I found nine robins and one pair of bluebirds, a total increase of about two or three. I saw six juncos, an increase of two or three, and seven white-crowned sparrows, an increase of five or six. There were ten pine siskins--down from 18 last year. I say those great conservationists--the U.S. Department of Agriculture and their offshoot, the Forest Service--have done their job well, if "conserving" means wiping out the birds.

Just over the mountains from here, seven horned larks, two Brewer's blackbirds, two meadow larks and one curlew--an increase of eleven. However, the curlew has been fading out for years--even before pesticides. As a boy, I heard the curlew's call almost daily--a song of wild and ethereal beauty; a song embodying the loneliness of a loon's call and the mystery of the divine --to hear it was to be stirred to the depths of one's soul.

Along Highways 41 and 287 to the mouth of Granite Creek there was a sprinkling of birds--no flocks--mostly blackbirds, but not a single small songster. I suppose if I had walked far enough into these grass- and sage-covered grounds, I would have found some, but always before (four years ago), they fairly swarmed here at the edge--so why go farther?

ELI P. CHRISTENSEN Philipsburg, Mont.

The Tempters

Sir: Meaning no ill will to the residents of Pinole, hurrah for the snakes [June 29J. I see them as one more sign that nature, despite man's insistence on squelching out, in the name of progress, every living thing that stands in his way, can be conquered only as man himself is annihilated. Nature, however, is just. That no one succumbed to the venom suggests to me the peaceful ways of most living things other than man. No, I do not see the snakes as seeking revenge (justified though they may be) upon the bulldozer, but as serpents coming to tempt us, before it is too late, back to the Garden of Eden.

PATRICIA COLE Columbus

Sir: The great final sentence in your report about the rattlesnakes of Pinole brings to mind a remark of John Muir's in his Sierra book about the poison ivy: "Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, 'Why was it made?' goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself."

PAUL RAINEY Georgetown, Ohio

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