It was simply inevitable given the SLA's political objectives and the state of California and national politics that their strategy would not only fail but jeopardize the political position of the Left, in general. Such gross political aad moral miscalculation--especially for a group supposedly committed to the SLA's announced ideals--totally undermines any claim that might be made for the moral legitimacy of their activities. If we take the SLA's program seriously and acknowledge, in some sense, the righteousness of its discontent, the sincerity and personal suffering of the SLA's members still do not justify their adventurism or the real and potential suffering they wrought for the Left and other innocent people. Whether the dead SLA members were good or bad people as individuals, what the SLA accomplished as a group must be judged morally and politically reprehensible.

Yet, there is no justification for the way six members of the SLA were ultimately destroyed by police--even if it can be argued that such a dramatic death may have served their political purposes more eloquently than any planned action. It is impossible to believe that the Los Angeles police and the FBI needed 400 men equipped with helicopters, tear gas, bullets, and fragmentation grenades to overcome six amateur gunmen trapped in a single house. Nor is there any excuse for the police to have totally ignore the safety of the community. A crippled woman sitting on the porch next door to the SLA's hideout had to be helped to cover when the shooting began without previous warning.

Finally, it's easy to guess whether the police would have so cavalierly destroyed the SLA's hideout had its members fled to a stucco mansion like the Hearsts' in Hillsborough rather than to the modest home of a black family living on the edges of a southeast Los Angeles ghetto. That the police should have appeared "the good guys" on television was ironic, all the more so because California authorities are using SLA activities as an excuse for rounding up dozens of Bay area radicals on unverified charges.

THERE IS ALSO no justification for the press's coverage of the SLA--biased, sexist, sensationalist, and superficial. The Boston Globe has devoted three days of features this week to a popular psychology-type diagnosis of Patricia Hearst's emotional development. In The Globe, she is described as dependent and weak-willed. The Los Angeles Times last February called her self-reliant and "a classic beauty." References to the sexual mores of the SLA women abound. Even Vin McLellan, a Boston Phoenix writer who has thoroughly reported the background of Donald DeFreeze, belittles the SLA for misspellings in their documents and ridicules the group's members' poor marital relationships.

Some kind of journalistic low point was achieved by The Boston Globe in its capsule profile of Patricia Soltysik on May 19; the piece concludes: "Once devoted to cashmere sweaters, she adopted black and white striped overalls." What such information adds to public understanding is inconceivable; that it detracts from more important issues is certain. The Globe also exaggerated the length of the Los Angeles gun battle and the volume of ammunition and the number of police involved.

Because the press by and large has not done its job--because there has been a disturbing tendency to reduce issues of terror and morality, politics and justice, and life and death to popular psychologizing and knee-jerk sermonizing--it is crucial for political activists, particularly on the Left, to take the SLA's example seriously. It is imperative that activists examine the SLA's experience in order to arrive at a better understanding of the moral, as well as the tactical ramifications of violent political programs whether at home or in Uruguay, Israel, or Ireland. The Left needs to formulate a coherent moral vision and to maintain a vigorous moral debate not only to avoid unnecessarily alienating the majority of the American public, but also as a basis for the design of constructive tactics. The editors of Ramparts wrote:

If there is a lesson to be learned from the SLA, it is that in a society as violently racist, exploitative and aggressively heartless as America's, we cannot afford to be without an organized mass movement of the Left. For what the Left means in human terms is a moral community of hope--the revolutionary possibility of a better way.

We need a 'moral community of hope' to protect against both the destructive adventurism of self-obsessed quasi-revolutionaries and a successful government repression of leftist activity in a broad campaign of force or legal harassment which may one day be massed with the public's fearful consent.