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From the Vietnamese We'll Have to Learn To Create a Society In Which To Live

I would love to be able to write: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

I cannot. Tyranny, like hell, may not be conquered at all, At least not by us as we are. We have had the life sucked out of us-gigantic blood-swollen ticks sucking at our hearts and heads. The statue with the big torch has burned us to ashes. We can no longer love nor desire nor even hate. We will have to sink back into the clay again in order to form ourselves as men. That's how I will begin. Clay first, then men.

"Les choses etat ce qu'elles sont, les hommes sont ce qu'ils font."-Jean Laconture

The second floor of the Harvard CRIMSON. A young, liberal member of the Harvard Corporation is sitting on a broken, green leather chair, stuffing falling out all over. A dozen reporters watch eagerly with notebooks.

"Are you against the war?" I ask.

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"Of course I am."

"What are you doing to end it?"

Pause. "Why, nothing."

"The most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited classes, animals trees, water, air, and grass."-Gary Snyder

Most of us are human racists. We think that the world was made for us. Some even think that we made the world (and therefore we can destroy it). Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden because they thought that it was all theirs. God was the first ecological revolutionary.

Roxanne O'Connell reports that 10.000 pelican chicks won't be born this year because pelican eggs are collapsing and killing the embrvos. The mothers ingested DDT which upset their calcium metabolism. That caused them to lay thin-shelled eggs that could not support their weight. Pelican eggs collapsed in the rookeries all the way from Anacapa to Mexico. The pelican, the osprev, the cormorant, the petrel; the seagull, the American Bald Eagle and the peregrine falcon: all of their eggs are collapsing, the shells are too thin. No new generations are being born.

From the Old Mole: On the banks of the Mississippi below St. Louis, there are signs warning picnickers not to eat their lunch on or near the banks. The spray from the river contains typhoid, colitis, hepatitis., diarrhea, salamonella, tuberculosis, and polio. It is an open sewer. If you place a fish in a container of river water, it will die n 60 seconds. Dilute the water 100 times with clear water, and the fish will die in 24 hours.

A Nader's Raider called the CRIMSON from Washington last summer and announced that they had discovered scandals in the Agriculture, Department bigger than Billy Sol Estes. He said that half of the Ag Dept. was so corrupt that they'd have to be fired.

In his research on chemical disinfectants, he found that the crop sprays used by large Midwestern land owners caused cancer in chickens. It turns out that about half of the chickens we eat have cancer in their bodies, or maybe it's a third in Massachusetts. Cancerous chicken tissue is supposed to cause brain lesions in dogs and cats.

He also found that the Ag Dept. had covered up a trichinosis epidemic in St. Louis that had been caused by poor meat inspection. In fact, the Ag Dept. had information showing that meat inspection standards were already far too liberal, yet they were preparing to liberalize the standards even more.

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