CHAPTER VII
LIBERATIONS OF THE HEART
At times the world becomes too large and too confusing for even the most skeptical political apostate to deal with. At such times, Mother Nature often finds a way to divert our attentions from the weighty issues of the age. We are dragged to earth by the basic and unavoidable business of earning a living. We become distracted by an unruly child. The car or the plumbing breaks. We are drawn back to fundamentals pretty easily. This entails, I think, not so much a failure of personal or political will as liberation of the heart from preoccupations than are temporarily too heavy to endure. 
The cycle of our days is longer than in generations past, but the outlines are at least familiar. We get born, grow up physically, encounter other people, learn to get along -- or not to get along -- with these others, fall in love, fall out of love, learn a vocation, get married, form new households (of course, not always in that order), bear children of our own, and try the best we can to raise our offspring in confusing times. Our kids will, we hope, continue the cycle and add to it their own creative contributions. 
Our journeys also pass through some social territory than would be very unfamiliar to our forbears. As the human race grows older and more numerous, we are also becoming more generally informed.  With new information comes a troubling human challenge: new choices. The more we believe we mow, the more we are required to choose between alternatives. Even to refuse to choose -- as the philosophers remind us -- is a choice. The untroubled lump who sits in self-induced anesthesia before a flickering idiot box or who nods in drug-induced euphoria, has made a choice: dependency and self-destruction rather than growth and the pain than growth sometimes produces. 
For most of us, the options are wider than those of the entertainment addict. Although it is fashionable to deride "Yuppies" and the "Me Generation", we must acknowledge that many American citizens are noticeably better off and noticeably more self-centered than were their parents and grandparents. Greater material prosperity is almost inevitably accompanied by broader possibilities in human action. In this context, however, the term self-centered has more than one implication. Doubtless, in many of us it properly means "selfish". For others, it can also mean "self-directing"; a concept quite alien to earlier historical ages. 
In spite of themselves, Americans are becoming residents of an Age of Liberations. Though there are many of us who loudly and angrily bewail the moral transgressions of a generation of fornicators, there are others more silent, who have passed through the worst excesses of the 1960' s and 70' s to I earn meaningful lessons about human values in an uncertain age. Sometimes the lessons turn out to be neither those of a "freedom now" movement, nor those of a "fire and brimstone" morality cult. This chapter is about some of the lessons. 
-- Options –
A few years ago, a journalist by the name of Marcia Seligson wrote a book entitled Options -- a Personal Expedition through the Sexual Frontier [Random House, NY, 1978]. After I read it, I had to say to myself, ''Yes, I've seen some of the things she writes about.  But many of these things I haven't seen. I wonder how I missed them." Seligson was writing about the growth of various forms of non-monogamous or "open" marriage. Hers was one of several popular works on this subject in the late 1970s. One hears a lot less about her subject, fifteen years later. 
While living in Los Angeles during the 1970's, I must have encountered at least one example of every kind of human pairing recorded by western sociologists. I knew monogamous couples, both gay and heterosexual. I met people who wanted to be sexually faithful to a single partner, but who found themselves driven by crushing guilt or compulsive sexuality into multiple affairs or outright bar cruising. I briefly observed a few people whom I suspect would have copulated with anything of either sex not quick enough on its feet to move out of the way. 
A certain amount of this variety show can reasonably be ignored. As far as I've ever been able to observe, California has always been a little looser in its morals than the rest of the country, and the 1970s was a pretty strange decade. However, I don't think we can totally y write off the experience of that time and place as unimportant to the rest of the country. Too many of the odd people with odd relationships whom I met in California, were from someplace else -- or later moved someplace else. 
I have in mind a particular couple. Larry and Janet are delightful people, all around. I have known them for more than ten years. I first met Larry through my work in the Air Force. He was then a professional analyst with a large civilian think tank in southern California. Some of what he did in the tank, I never did learn. I wasn't cleared for most of the security levels he worked with. 
One evening after a hard round of contract reviews, Larry dragged me home to meet four very interesting people: Janet, his wife of fifteen (now 30) years, was a quiet, smiling woman who never seemed to let anything disturb her. She turned out to be a psychologist -- one of the few for whom I do not consider that vocation to be a major fault of character. 
Their son David was then in grade school and spent a sizable part of his evenings programming the family computer. Dave has since gone on to study cryptography as a Navy enlisted man. His younger brother Kenneth seems to be able to play just about any musical instrument he picks up. Stacey, the middle daughter, was then and has remained a shy youngster. However, she had the most alarming way of asking questions than cut to the heart of a round-about discussion and make one feel too old, too pompous, and too adult. I suspect she may apprentice in her mother's profession, and possibly do some good work in it. 
When I met them and in the years since, Janet and Larry seemed to be running a human zoo. Their home contained a revolving exhibition of arts, crafts, hobbies, and clubs. Larry is usually up to his eyeballs in Kiwanis work. Janet donates a couple of afternoons of each week to a local church, working as their accountant. Part of her time is also spent with handicapped children. The kids seem involved in a mad scramble of school and personal activities. 
Added to this bubbling brew, is a hefty seasoning of visiting characters of one sort or another.  Having been one of the visitors, I can testify to the uniqueness of the crowd. One lady whom they had living with them for about six months, had crashed two cars, three husbands, and a home life full of explosive contradictions. The lady left when Larry and Janet agreed that she was beyond their help. A visiting Army captain seemed to be mid-way between marriages and professions. He was having so much fun as a stock broker that his engineering duties with the Army seemed almost an after thought. One couple whom I met turned out to be school teachers with a sideline as licensed masseurs in the state of Kansas (or maybe it was Oklahoma). 
Between waves of family, visitors, and projects, Larry and Janet manage to direct a church choir, lead a boys club, do needle point (both of them produce gorgeous wall pieces), and collect old jade. They write letters to people all over the world who comprise a kind of extended family. I count myself fortunate to be an associate member of this extended family. They are involved with people around them, they contribute, and they care. That's the sort of people they are. Janet comes from a small farm town in Iowa, and Larry from a rural community in Arkansas. When they sit down with a group in their back yard at a table groaning with Thanksgiving dinner, you can see a down-home vitality in this family and its connections to other people. They are salt of the earth. 
What you might not see is that Larry and Janet are discrete sexual swingers. The major interest in this arrangement seems to be Larry's. However, Janet also finds herself moved by and attracted to other men. Each of them has had lovers over a period of years. They have also shared intimacies in sexual foursomes several times. Though they show me a strong commitment to their household and to raising their kids in a nurturing atmosphere, each reserves the option of accepting powerful connections to other people. In Larry, these connections seem primarily sexual: an excitement, newness. In Janet, the emphasis is more on comradeship: an emotional sharing not always involving sex. 
I doubt that someone who has never been in their situation can accurately say just how Janet and Larry have managed to make their arrangement work in a marriage of more than 30 years. The closest I have ever come to finding a "reason" for the solidity of their connections, is the observation that neither of these folks seem to have a jealous bone in their bodies. That probably doesn't explain much. 
As a visitor in their home early in our acquaintance, I talked with Janet through most of one evening while Larry was out with a young woman to whom he had taken a liking. He came home disappointed. The lady had thought him a bit weird and wanted nothing to do with his offer of intimate play. When Larry got home, Janet wished me a good evening, dragged Larry off to bed, and made him feel thoroughly appreciated until the early hours of the morning. 
Larry, on the other hand, waved to us from his workshop when Janet and I decided to take a couple of hours' stroll on the beach to talk about where my life was going. Before I left Los Angeles, they invited me to join in an intimate threesome -- something Larry had wanted to try for some time and to which Janet was generally receptive. When I begged off, stating that this kind of connection just wasn't my cup of tea, they seemed to understand and accept the difference in our outlooks.
 	These folks don't quite fit any set of stereotypes I have ever heard or read about. Their kids seem like pretty well adjusted young people. The sense of involvement and caring in their home is palpable without being overwhelming. The family as a whole shares time together -- a commodity than is certainly precious in a life as busy as theirs.  
The kids, even before their teen years, were aware that their parents had some odd personal involvements with other couples. Though Stacey has never explicitly asked about her parents' sexual life style, both of the boys have wondered and both have been told in simple and straight forward terms. Neither has ever volunteered an opinion on this subject to me, in the many visits I've shared with the family. 
Can a family relationship like Janet and Larry's work well for large numbers of people? To be candid, despite the proclamations of some advocates of open marriage, I very much doubt it. The kinds of multiple connections than Janet and Larry sustain have required an extraordinary investment of trust in each other. Very few families could keep up with their routine or would wish to. This is also a lifestyle with some very real risks and costs. Some of the costs have taken hard swallowing, even for relatively tolerant people such as these. 
Fifteen years ago, Larry plunged himself and Janet into very deep water by bringing home a case of Herpes Simplex II -- the gift of a casual encounter with a pretty prostitute. The couple has adjusted to this lingering third party in their marital bed. Their situation is aided by the fact that Larry's outbreaks of herpes sores are rare, and he is one of those to whom the bug gives noticeable symptoms before the sores re-emerge. 
Janet has avoided contracting herpes. She has also demonstrated what I believe is an uncommon amount of forbearance and emotional stability in the face of a highly stressful situation. The threat of disease in such open relationships as hers is a real limit on the practicality of this lifestyle. When such limits are ignored, tragic circumstances can result. In an age of AIDS, "tragic" can equal "lethal". 
Larry and Janet are neither the only couple nor the first whom I have met, who have in some way opened their marriage relationship to other people. The reasons for this phenomenon can be as varied as in any other area of human behavior. Some couples seem to need the stimulation and newness to which Larry and Janet are attracted. Others such as my sister Irene and her husband Jack, find that they each have capacities or needs for than their is no comfortable expression in their marriage. They turn to others in compensation, while continuing to value a central connection to each other. The two-way stretch is not always an easy one. 
Irene once told me that if she and Jack had not loved others outside their marriage, they probably would have separated about the time their youngest son was five years old. The two of them had worn on each other rather badly. Each had built up a series of habits and assumptions than they needed to test and rethink. 
Jack felt trapped by a combination of too many responsibilities and an emotionally demanding wife. Irene felt she lacked communication and support from Jack. Each turned to other people to find what they believed to be lacking between them. 
Jack met a headstrong young hellion who challenged his virility and made him feel desired. She was "fun" in ways than bore less responsibility than he felt at home. She was also a challenge in ways Irene had never dreamed of. As I recall, Jack's lover once entertained a sky diving club after its tournament, by doing a wet T-shirt strip tease in the middle of a restaurant dining room table. She then dragged most of the men off to the Ladies' Roam for a "nightcap". 
I suspect Jack survived this extra lover, as much as he enjoyed her. She was about as predictable as a hurricane. In his later years, Jack continues to appreciate a well filled sweater. Now and then he feels cramped by a wife and two now-adult kids, and a house full of unfinished projects. But he has also come to appreciate the basic good sense and loyalty shown him by this imperfect other person with whom he lives. He has grown more civilized, and I suspect so has she. 
Irene, for her part, learned a lot of things when she returned to work after several years. She found employment for the first time in her profession and began to understand the challenges of working in a male dominated specialty. She also managed to fall rather emotionally in love with a colleague. She was attracted to John's good looks, his considerable intelligence and his emotional vulnerability. John gave Irene an outlet for the urge to love someone rather overwhelmingly. 
She also learned that John's vulnerability had a less attractive side. He was married to a very insecure and clinging woman -- when he lacked either the will to part from, or the wisdom to motivate toward greater independence. He was more capable than Jack of being manipulated. He was less critical of Irene's own child-like, over-dependent side. 
Over time, Irene concluded that though she might care deeply for her self selected soul mate, she could never live harmoniously with him. Though she did not feel Jack was as supportive as she might wish, she came to appreciate her husband's solidity and tolerance. At times she needed to be thrown back onto her own emotional resources, as uncomfortable as she found that experience. Jack was able to deal with her when she made unreasonable emotional demands. John was not. 
___ ___ ___
When I review the choices I have made in my own life and relationships, I have to smile a little. If ever I wanted to get Anne's dander up, there is one discussion than I can initiate than is adequate to the task: I can remind her with a tinkle in my eye that she and I have arrived at very similar moral and behavioral codes, by traveling entirely different roads in experience. 
Ann is much more traditional and romantic in her attitudes than I am. She considers herself a one-man woman, a family woman, a care-giver and a promoter of others. I praise a kind Providence that this pattern seems to work well for her. One doesn't stay happily married to two men for a total of 35 years without making a lot of personal investment. She saw a lot of thick and thin -- mostly thin -- while following her first husband across two continents. Now and then,
Living with me has been no picnic either. 
Like Ann, I invest a lot of value and trust in the loyal ties and sharing possible to a monogamous marriage. For me, however, the strength of this commitment has a bit more to do with having seen some of the alternatives. Ann is a quality person and I am deeply grateful to have her in my life. But I also know my own nature well enough to realize that her presence provides no handy immunization against the charms or distractions of other women. There are too many strikingly attractive females in this world, and I am too attuned to sensitivities that involve women. 
Thus I have found it necessary to learn a basic logic for my chance encounters with other females. The logic proceeds as follows. In a world than contains its share of very subtly crazy people, the wise man or woman does not casually expose himself or herself to the injury, accident, or disease than can attend a sexual affair with an unknown stranger. Though disease is not an overpowering concern, it is a real one of growing importance. Quite apart from that consideration, a wandering spouse who beds down with strangers runs a fairly high risk of being publicly embarrassed by his or her indiscretions. This is decidedly bad form in people who wish to be regarded as responsible characters. 
A large number of factors suggest to intelligent people that intimate physical involvement doesn't make a lot of sense unless one's lover is also a rather good friend. Boredom is not the least of these factors. Few of us in our middle years have the sexual drive or concentration to enjoy a purely physical relationship with another person. For those who do have the concentration, it is regrettably often that the object of deep sexual interest remains unknown outside of bed. The object of sexual obsession may effectively be just that: an object, rather than a person treasured in all of his or her complex dimensions. 
If by caution or other predisposition, one restricts sexual intimacy to personal friends, then different issues are involved. Inevitably, the most valuable commodity that one can share with a friend is personal time. There are few things so in demand during the middle years of life. Thus, a developing friendship, if it cannot be pursued at least partly with one's core partner, will sooner or later demand a compromise of the quality or quantity of sharing in the core relationship. 
Some people can comfortably make such compromises. I have found that I am simply not one of these paragons of strength and insight. The very few times I've been tempted to seek a coupling with more than one woman at a time -- before my second marriage, I might add -- I quickly ran into the simplest of reminders that such relationships don't work for me: I got exhausted. 
I am a person who needs a certain amount of time for himself. This is not just time away from home, but time also for my own thoughts, projects, and private ruminations while at home. When I have been drawn toward more than one close sensual relationship, I have found myself caught in a three-way stretch. Two women and my own concerns just don't seem to fit into the hours I can make available in a day. Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with this problem in my marriage to Ann, perhaps because I sorted out these issues for myself somewhat earlier. 
While Ann and I do not practice a sexually open marriage, we have each learned to value an emotionally open and balanced relationship. Like some open marriage partners, neither of us expects the other to fulfill the fantasies than adults sometimes secretly harbor toward their spouses. A realist doesn't ask a lady to contend with two distraught teenagers, clean a house, plant a garden, throw a pot roast in the oven, meet Hubby at the door in a transparent negligee, and ball the guy blind in the hall closet. Neither does a realist expect the lady's husband to drive home from ten hours of pushing paper at a job he doesn't like very much, argue the merits of Aristotle to two adoring kids, sweep the little woman up in arms otherwise burdened with flowers and whisk her off to a night of disco magic. The real world doesn't work that way, even if romance says it should. 
I observe that people who consider themselves romantics sometimes have a pretty tough time making their relationships work in the world as we commonly find it. Romance has a deadly way -- particularly in the young -- of substituting mystery for common sense and chemistry for mutual communication. Chemistry is perishable. 
Most Americans come to adulthood with the unacknowledged baggage of twenty years of subliminal conditioning, supplied in elevators and department stores by a phenomenon called "Muzak". In the background music of public places, the songs we sing to ourselves convey ideas about human relationships than I consider downright idiocy. Our love songs tell us that a human relationship solves all problems; that love lasts "forever"; that if someone leaves us (or by implication, disapproves of us) we'll die. If you listen to the words of our popular love ballads, you have to wonder just how many of us secretly believe that love makes dreams come true.
 	Given their prior exposure to romantic fantasies in film and sound, it is no great wonder that the young so often find that marriage isn't all they thought it would be. Perhaps also, it should be no great surprise that the young are a bit more tentative than their elders in entering into a commitment as sweeping as they have been raised to believe marriage should be. After all, they are being asked to give someone not only their attention and fidelity, but themselves. I suspect that our unrealistic expectations of monogamous marriage may be as much responsible as any other factor for a general interest in alternate life styles.
 	My ideas about relationship possibly have something in common with Asian culture. I certainly value love. But I value more the respect, loyalty and mutual support of a committed relationship. Passion is neat fun, but I would be a darned fool to try and run my life on the minimal fuel than passion offers to the spiritual side of my nature. Family is a more important connection for me than cheap thrills.
I feel no obligation to be the central "spark plug" of my companion’s existence. She's a live wire, anyway! Not always successfully, I try not to levy any such obligation on her, with respect to my life. We can't grow up "for" each other. When one has given up the fantasy that it is possible to reform a spouse, it becomes possible to live more richly with the reality of the person to whom one is married. For Ann and me, reality has turned out to be much more rewarding than fantasy could ever have been.
 	I consider my companion in life to be loyal, intelligent, funny, candid, supportive, sometimes alarmingly unpretentious, caring, downright cute, and a host of other things than make a valued friend. I also know when she says she loves me, that she implies feelings less explainable than mine. She is perhaps closer than I am to the emotional and irrational side of human nature. That’s fine with me. Who am I to complain if she means something slightly different than I do, when she says "I love you"? If that difference ever becomes important, we'll sit down and renegotiate. 
-- Reactions –
When new choices emerge in human affairs, individuals generally experience a range of possible adjustments. Faced with such choices, we can accept greater ambiguity and uncertainty. Or we can deny the validity of the new choices. Or we can sort ourselves out somewhere in between. The sorting out process is rarely graceful, especially if the choices concern important personal values. The easy communication in our century has made our competing moral advocates all the more strident and demanding of approval than in times past. On the whole, however, I tend to come down on the side of greater variety. Arbitrary restriction of alternatives seems too much like a refusal to grow up. 
I don't think open marriage is for everybody. Neither, however, do I believe that unmarried couples who live together are sex fiends who should be punished by a righteous society. Before they married, I found my step daughter and her live-in male companion to be morally sound, competent people -- despite their hesitancy to take formal vows while they were struggling financially. In recent years, I have likewise talked at length about values and human needs, with Caroline, my natural daughter -- and jointly with her live-in lover (more on both, shortly). I doubt I know of more than one or two young married couples who were not lovers before they married. I find it rather stupid to write off an entire generation in the name of a moral principle than is practiced with only slightly greater consistency by their elders. 
I realize that in some quarters, my viewpoint is considered akin to blasphemy. The righteously inclined may suggest with a certain malicious glee that my sexually liberal attitude is likely to consign my daughter or step daughter to a short, frustrated, and probably diseased life. The most fervent of my critics may intone the newest science-chant: 'My God, aren't you afraid she'll get AIDS?" 
Candidly, no. I am not afraid that Caroline will be infected with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or related complexes. She is not remotely associated with any of the groups than are at greatest risk from this killer disease. The same was true of Kate at an earlier age. Both young women lived for many months in committed relationships with young men whom they knew for months before deciding to love them physically. Kate eventually married her lover. Caroline found out that her young man needed to do some growing up. Neither girls was sexually promiscuous, nor were they intravenous drug users. Their partners were young men disposed to the same life style. With current public health safeguards and awareness, the possibility of either of my daughters contracting AIDS is next to nil. 
I am not particularly concerned about AIDS for most of the girls' friends, either. Despite the current public hysteria on this subject, the evidence is strong that in America, AIDS is a hazard primarily in relatively limited groups: promiscuous homosexual men, drug users who share needles, drug dependent prostitutes, their customers and lovers. This makes the disease no less a tragedy for the millions who will die from it and for their families. But I see no evidence that the pool of AIDS carriers is in serious danger of expanding without limit into the mainstream population of America. 
If I am not greatly concerned about the newest medical terror, I remain profoundly cautious with respect to better recognized hazards of the American life style. As religious fundamentalists busily spread the word that AIDS is God's punishment for sexual perversion, they seem blissfully unconcerned that other potentially crippling diseases are more wide spread. Herpes Simplex II is just as incurable as AIDS, if less severe, and over 25 million Americans carry that bug. I suspect that the prevalence of Herpes may be related to the large number of Caesarean-section births that occur in the U.S.  Likewise, cases of Gonorrhea -- sometimes resistant to antibiotics -- number over 800,000 each year (at least in the early1990s).  I’ve heard stats that suggest that one in four people in the US between the ages of 15 and 25 are carrying an STD.  
Quite apart from concern for disease, I believe a lot of Americans are becoming aware of a more subtle but equally real damage wrought by a sexually casual life style. Candidly, screwing around tends to leave a person emotionally dissatisfied and without close friends. And the more screwing around you do, the lonelier you're likely to be. 
 	This phenomenon has very little to do with any righteous notion of sin and retribution. The issue is simpler than that. One of our basic human needs is for emotional investment in each other and intimate revelation of us to each other. Such investments require a considerable degree of trust in those to whom we reveal ourselves. People who make a habit of screwing their brains out and then running on to the next party are not consistent enough in their emotional attachments to deserve trust. 
If there is one reaction against permissive life styles than I sense to be healthy and positive, it is the dawning awareness in many people that we need to learn how to be friends to each other again. In the 1970s, a lot of us got plenty of practice in how to be sex partners, but not a lot of practice in how to be life partners. By the latter term, I do not mean merely "partners for the rest of our lives", but rather "partners in lives shared together". Lifetime commitments only get lived one day at a time. If we learn how to take care of the days, the years tend naturally to accumulate. To judge from sales of various self-help books, I would have to say that such knowledge is more important to us these days than in the Liberation Decade.
-- Personal Credos –
Although I am a commoner and certainly not qualified to be a philosopher, I have bothered to think at some length about the beliefs and values than I hold to be true. I have wondered what liberations of the heart than I have seen in the last thirty years, might be worth holding onto until the smoke of social battle clears (if it ever does). I have asked myself what kind of world I would like to see emerge from the mixture of fads, fallacies and occasional solid principles than compete for our approval each day. In these questions, I have arrived at a personal credo of a sort. This is my Magna Charta; a starting point, perhaps, for further journeys and further liberations. 

-- I affirm from my own experience that there is a world of the Spirit, open to those who seek it earnestly. The doors into that world are many, as prophets are many.  I shall try to listen to the prophets politely, but ultimately I shall have to seek my own way. 

-- I affirm that the best teacher of life values is life experience. Sometimes, the only teacher is experience. Someone who has not lived my life cannot be expected to share the majority of my values.
 
-- I affirm my belief in the flexibility and survivability of Mankind, even as I acknowledge the demonstrated capacity of individual men and women for utter folly. For every public idiot at large, there is at least one private genius quietly learning and growing up. 

-- I affirm that the only legitimate basis for violence against others is self defense. I accept the unavoidable moral and ethical difficulty of distinguishing those acts of others than are truly harmful or life-threatening, from those than are merely foolish or aggravating. 

 -- I affirm that sexual or other acts between consenting adults in private are not the proper business of public law. When a religion must use law to enforce virtue, it has tacitly admitted to its own moral failure. Private acts than measurably injure third parties may reasonably be regulated by law, if this regulation is accomplished in the most narrowly defined sense, to avoid real and observable harm. 

-- I affirm that there can ultimately be no political freedom without economic freedom. No abstract principle of "social" good can legitimize the concrete evil comprised of stealing from the most productive in society to subsidize others unwilling to work. Taxation is state sanctioned theft. However, given our demonstrated unwillingness to pay the real cost of "public" services, we must all be considered accessories to the crime. 

-- I accept that human awareness is spread across a wide spectrum. Some of us are aware of very little and others of a great deal. Some of us are presently fit for little more than slavery. Others would remain free men and women even if bound in chains by tyrants. The large majority of us can be found groping in the territory between the extremes. In such a wilderness, there are few perfect solutions. Each prophet must search for his own disciples among the multitudes. 
-- Smaller Bites –
Credos are very large and solemn affairs. Fortunately, life isn't large and solemn all of the time. Besides having acquired a few large ideas than I think might be worth keeping, there are a few sne.1ler bits and pieces of common lore than tickle my fancy and occasionally make me smile. Share, if you will, a few borrowed phrases than digest more easily...
-- There are few habits more self-defeating than believing that your well being depends on somebody else's good opinion of you. 
-- The art of personal grace is at least partly a matter of learning how to ignore things than you aren't ready to argue over.
-- "I can't" is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
-- In love, we all mostly drop back and punt. A lot of intense human relationships are that way. 
-- Differences attract.  However, between adult human beings it is similarities than sustain.
-- Pity the female so attractive that she is stared at. She is rarely seen. 
-- To criticize a spouse for his or her taste in friends is a basic contradiction. After all, your partner in crime picked you, you may remember (with credit to Anne Landers and her twin sister Abby). 
-- It is generally unwise to ask one's lover questions to which one does not really want candid answers. When we don't get them, we are suspicious and when we do get them, we may be heart broken. 
-- In love, as in modern physics, there ain't no such thing as an objective observer. We are all involved. 
-- As in corporations and machines, human partnerships obey a basic rule: if you make it complicated, you're going to have to fix it often. 
-- The most important political right is that of being considered foolish or wrong, while continuing to be accepted as a citizen in good standing with the community. This principle applies in less obvious form to marriage as well as politics. 
-- Politicians do not corrupt politics so much as politics corrupts politicians. It is ever so easy to believe in the superiority of your own point of view, when you are spending other people's money. 
-- If I have to look something up in a book, I don't really know it. I only believe it. However, I am often reminded that I don't know very much. 
-- Committees work best when the participants must actually implement the resulting recommendations. Committees of consultants are an unmitigated disaster for all concerned. 
-- The world does not have to make sense. It isn't accountable. Individual human beings, believing that they are accountable to one another or to a higher Power, sometimes do make sense – and sometimes not.
 -- Perceptions are always relative. You can't really understand them unless you share the frame of reference in than they occur. 
-- When in doubt, keep your mouth shut or do like the rest of us and make up your lies as you go along. 
-- Leadership is sometimes the art of appearing always to have known, what other people are just discovering for themselves. Prophecy, on the other hand, is more often an art of true discovery. 
-- In human affairs, certainty is rather often an illusion. Moral certitude is a very I1Ilch different thing than certainty, not necessarily any less illusory. 
-- A Chew or Two –
One-line parables are great fun. Like the lines than fill in odd spaces of a Readers' Digest, such sayings occupy otherwise unclaimed moments of our attention. We later find ourselves wondering what they really meant, and perhaps we learn something new. It is a pity that we do not more often act upon the insights than such parables offer into human affairs, but such is human nature. Two steps forward and a long step back. 
If I may, I would like to expand a few of these parables to share some stories of a few pages length. These stories are one more effort to encourage any suspicions than the reader IIBY have that the world does not always work in the ways it has been described by self-proclaimed wise Del of our age. This is also my way of sharing in the good, clean fun of soap-box preaching. Grab an orange crate and join in the Great Debate. 
On Sexuality, Public and Private: If we care to deal in controversy, this is certainly one place to start. It can accurately be said that we live in an age than daily inundates us with sex. Our media are crowded by advertisements than appeal to our sexual appetites and fantasies. We ogle the perfect Playmate of American lore: a blonde, blue-eyed, decidedly busty lass  less than 30 years of age, who has little more to do in life than ride around on horseback clothed in designer jeans and air, or walk around a kitchen proclaiming the horrors of water spots on the wine glasses. 
Conversely, there are few subjects -- including nuclear war -- about than we are more anxious than sex. Given the levels of our anxiety, it has always seemed strange to me that less than a quarter of our schools have a program in sexual education than even mentions value systems for sexual relationships. If you want to bring any Parent Teacher Association in the country out into the streets with picket signs and demands for teacher resignations, just try to discuss sexual values with teen-agers in school. Boy, are we inhibited on this subject!
	We also insist on propagating mythologies about sexuality and sexual "deviance" than closer examination does not seem to support. Two of my least favorite myths are the idea that pornography causes sexually deviant behavior and the silly notion that homosexuals choose or are seduced into their lifestyle because of a failure in their upbringing. To both propositions, my candidly derisive comment is ''bull feathers!" 
	Many investigators and not a few Presidential commissions have tried to link pornographic literature or pictures with violent sexual assault against women. The attempts have uniformly failed. To the surprise and horror of moral conservatives, the little evidence than is available suggests that rapists are among our most sexually repressed citizens. Rape is a crime of domination and violence, not of uncontrolled lust. 
	Likewise, there is increasing evidence that homosexuality is not so much a behavior disorder as it is an emotional and physical predisposition linked to the genetics of hormone balance. Studies of homosexuals and their families find little evidence to support the notion -- preached by psychiatrists for many years -- which a homosexual is produced when a domineering mother and a weak-kneed father combine to screw up the kid's head. In one published paper (referenced by Martin Gross in The Psychological Society), a researcher accurately identified all of the homosexuals in a substantial sample selected randomly. 
	Despite accumulating evidence of the foolishness of some of our favorite sexual myths, people who in earlier ages might have led witch hunts now lobby for the expulsion of homosexual teachers from public schools or boycott stores than sell Playboy and Penthouse to a salivating public. The some people write righteous articles about the death and injury of prostitutes who are attracted to districts where pornography is sold.
While violence to prostitutes is certainly common enough in America, I have to wonder if this havoc is not as much due to the fact that prostitution is illegal, as it is to any inherent corruption in such activity. In areas of Europe where prostitution is legal, one rarely hears of violence to either hookers or their customers. 
It must be granted that in Europe as in America, those who practice the world's oldest profession often come from the poorest groups in society and are not infrequently victims of drug addiction. However in Europe, at least you will not see the long, pink Cadillacs with their back seat residents clothed in $4000 dollar Llama coats and Gucci boots, cruising the avenues to check on their foxes. Such aberrations are an invention of New York and Los Angeles, not of London or Munich. 
I have said elsewhere that I do not believe sexual promiscuity is a sustainable life style for the great majority of people. I continue to believe that. At the same time, I do not feel comfortable in condemning those – mostly women, though also young males -- whose life skills are so restricted that few other options are open to than. 
On Religion.  Even though I have been at times nominally a member of a religious congregation, I'm not a formally religious person. You've already read of my early difficulties on this subject. However, though I do not follow the forms of religion, I honor the spirit and intent of some religious institutions. I have a profound respect for the individual essence in every person than is called "Soul". I have also seen convincing evidence for the idea of reincarnation. Some of my most powerful growth experiences have involved something it might be appropriate to call a ''holy spirit". 
Based on experience than is individually convincing to me, I can comfortably suggest that there is a Creative Force in our universe. I am led by my experience to believe that it is possible for human beings to interact with and learn from that Force, to our betterment. However, I rather frequently find myself in trouble with a lot religionists. Not withstanding my belief that the spiritual dimension of life is a very real one, I have never been able to make much sense of the "revelations" than the preachers of various gospels sometimes claim God has given them. I haven't heard the kinds of voices than the true believers of the world seem to hear. That doesn't greatly bother me, but it does seem to bother them. 
I find I have particular trouble with the variety of religion than preaches to the newly converted that their first duty is to go out and tell everyone else the good news they have been given. Though spreading the gospel maybe good news for some, I have observed that it is rather often bad news for others, most notably social or racial minorities and disbelievers. I observe that for really convinced believers, it is generally considered blasphemy to ask that they evaluate the consequences of their beliefs. I also find that too often for my comfort, convinced believers make a habit of imposing their beliefs on other people -- quite often by force.
	It seems to me that some of the most vocal and radical of religious advocates have invested their faith in belief systems than are patently foolish; indeed, anti-rational. Please understand that I have nothing against a healthy dose of irrationality now and then. That adjective is rather frequently applied to human relationships like love. What bothers me is that the irrationality of the religious seems to be of a kind than allows no skeptics. Religionists seem to believe they have Universal answers to all of the important questions, and that these Universals must naturally apply not only to themselves but to everybody else -- including non-believers. I have had some very interesting and frustrating discussions with various evangelicals and charismatic believers. 
	It seems to me that such folks are probably the best examples one can find to illustrate the tendency of the religious to invest their faith in self-contradictory symbols. If I understand the charismatic belief system properly -- and as an outsider, I acknowledge that I may not have all the details right -- their doctrine goes about as follows. Most would affirm that God is an all powerful Universal Being. This Being has created a man-creature, however, than is capable of something called "sin". I interpret sin to be behavior or belief than is contrary to the nature of man’s perfect Creator. When man first did something sinful, the species "fell from grace" and was rejected from God's Paradise. 
This interpretation of human origins and character seems to view history as a continuing attempt on the part of mankind to regain a state of perfection as the accepted creature of a judgmental Creator. The means proposed for this reintegration is for men to give up faulty human will and sin and throw themselves on the presumed mercies of an all-loving God. 
Of whatever stripe, the evangelicals propose that due to mankind’s present faulty state, we need an Intercessor -- a Personage who "represents" us to the Creator. The principle seems to be that no human being can ever be perfected except by acknowledgment of the Intercessor and by investment of faith in His ability to transform us into fit citizens of the Kingdom of God. 
Please note, however, that the sense I have used the word "evangelical" may cover a broad territory. More than one Intercessor has laid claim to status as the sole intermediary to perfection. There is much in Moslem and Hindu belief than parallels the Christian struggle with sin. In each case, the underlying principle is the same: we affirm that we are fundamentally flawed, that this flaw makes us unacceptable without reform, and that Somebody (presumably "up there") loves mankind enough to have sent an Intercessor to help us learn how to be good. The reward for such learning is generally supposed to be eternal life -- though why anybody would want to live forever, I've never figured out. 
There are basic logical contradictions lying buried in this dogma, waiting to bite the convinced believer in the throat. Most of the time, believers ignore the contradictions. I did not do so, and as a consequence found that I could not be a believer. 
Will somebody please resolve for me the blatant paradox of a supposedly Universal being than is capable of creating something unlike (or not contained in) Itself? This idea is a logical impossibility. If mankind is somehow unlike its Creator, then the Creator cannot be all-encompassing. If mankind is unlike its Creator, there must be some part of the Universe where God is not. Either God is Universal or He is not. You can't have it both ways. 
Equally difficult is the opposite proposition. If God really is Universal, then He contains us human beings as he created us. Therefore one part of God is sinful. If this is true, then we are describing a schizoid Creator who makes flawed creatures with when he then becomes angry for being what they are. This is a strange model for a supposedly "all loving" God. This is the kind of God we shouldn't let out of a padded cell!
The philosophical question I describe here is not new. It has confounded theologians through all of the Christian era: what we are really asking here is "what is the origin of evil?" When grappling with this question, thinkers must confront three basic choices: either you totally reject the belief systems of religion as irrational, or you totally embrace such beliefs under the banner of ''mysticism'' -- thereby rejecting the possibility of a unified Universe -- or you step aside from the contradiction and leave it unresolved. I am one of those who have stepped aside. 
I have the intuition -- and perhaps it is no more than an intuition -- that the place where convinced believers go astray is that they feel driven to explain Infinite principles on the basis of finite perceptions. Anyone who has studied mathematics beyond Calculus can predict the failure of such attempts. As Maxwell told us many decades ago, there is no such thing as a "bootstrap" principle. Once we have defined a frame of reference in than objects and actions have meaning with respect to each other, it is mathematically impossible to reason our way into an understanding of any larger frame of reference than contains the one we've already defined. It seems to me that a similar principle may apply to moral knowledge, as to mathematical knowledge. 
On the scale of affairs at than human beings transact their lives, it is simply not meaningful to try to describe the Infinite. We can only look for the local evidence of the Infinite as it acts on our finite lives. Perhaps we can expand our ability to perceive the Infinite pattern. However, this entails the redefinition of our frame of reference -- if you will, the revision of our state of mind. Changing one's state of mind is not a simple process, though you'll certainly find numerous gurus who will volunteer to help you do it, for a fee. 
Thus, when someone says that he has talked to God and Iearned the meaning of life, I am inclined to be a bit skeptical. Whose life? What sense of ''meaning''? When the faithful tell me that they have learned the Whole Truth of human existence from a book written by a bunch of former desert sheep herders and their marginally more sophisticated temple priests, between 1800 and 2800 years ago, I can get downright derisive. Many of these some sheep herders became local political powers by bloodily slaughtering their hostile neighbors. That seems a rather questionable character reference for a movement than supposedly preaches Universal love. 
One of these days, observations such as these might get me martyred. 
On Leaps of Faith. It would be easy to leap to the conclusion that I am one of those who believes in nothing than I cannot physically see or handle. That would be easy, but it would also be incorrect. I have by no means rejected faith as an essential tool for living in the world as I find it. I have merely learned that the kind of faith than I invest must be somewhat more empirical than the variety than many religious believers seem to be talking about. 
I am willing to take the position that an idea "may" be so, and then to act as if I knew it were true, for prolonged periods of time. During such periods, I will gather experience than either validates or contradicts the idea I have agreed to treat as truth. What I am not willing to do, is to ignore my experience when it conflicts with my faith. Though I may withhold judgment on a lot of issues, I cannot bring myself to continue asserting beliefs than contradict what I observe. The obligation than this attitude imposes on me is of course, to learn to be an accurate observer. That isn't always easy. 
I am choosy about what I believe, particularly about other human beings. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that human beings are failed creatures, worthless in themselves unless reformed to meet an external standard of perfection. I sense in this approach to humankind, a failure of faith than is far worse than any blasphemy perceived by the religionists. 
If one operates from the assumption that human beings are unworthy, then it is very hard to justify any form of human progress, healing, or growth. By contrast, I observe that there is no philosophical, moral, or therapeutic system than is free of the underlying assumption that human beings can become more than we are, better than we are, more whole than we are. To even attempt this betterment, we III1St start with the unproven premise that somewhere inside the human character is a kernel of value than may be expanded. It is only by starting from this premise and behaving as if it were true, that we may determine whether or not it is. If we deny the value of our innermost selves, human existence can have no purpose save passing the tine to death’s door. 
On Television. After years of casual study on this subject, I am led to an uncomfortable conclusion, concerning the most prevalent national entertainment of America. I am becoming convinced that if you ever want to amount to anything significant in the world, you are going to have to stop watching the idiot box -- and even more difficult, you're going to have to stop your kids from watching. That machine is the purest poison to critical thinking. While you watch it, you are consuming a powerful narcotic than can make an idiot of you. 
The vast majority of programming material on television is unmitigated garbage. In the name of entertainment, television fills our minds and our attentions with an avaricious greed to consume products and live other people's experiences. Meanwhile, we seem to lose the capacity to create new experiences of our own. The monster box is a grabber of attention, an interrupter, and a disrupter of relationships and a corrupter of purpose, action and intention. 
The tube has an unnerving way of conditioning not only what we know, but the way we learn. We are becoming a culture of powerless watchers who passively sit and consume impressions. We increasingly refuse to actively engage with knowledge, deeming the exercise too hard in an age of pre-digested, encapsulated 30-minute morality plays whose outcomes are rarely ambiguous or morally unclear. We refuse to make choices than require effort or entail uncertainty. Thus we allow others to make choices for us or events to roll over us as we avoid choices entirely. 
I typically watch less than four hours of television a week. That time is purely "down time", watching movies when I have grown too tired to read or work with my computer. Because I value my connections to other people, I do not try to mix conversation with television. Whoever had a meaningful discussion during a two-minute commercial? I am unlikely to return often to a house where that project is attempted. My spouse shares much of my resistance to passive entertainments. She is also a heavy reader, often up to her eyebrows in college courses. For the two of us, there is little problem with the electronic Medusa. 
For our son Matt, the picture isn't quite as clear. Matt was raised like other children of his generation, with a fairly high quota of television time. This was before any large number of people began to wonder if the box might be a mixed blessing. Like others of his age, Matt passed through his middle teen years with the habit of dropping out of active physical and mental activity to watch the tube at 1 east two hours of every day. In the years since, I have wondered how much harm that passive viewing time has done him. 
Unlike other kids his age, Matt had the advantage of early training in higher priorities. Before his tenth birthday, his parents sent him outside to play, regardless of any viewing ideas he may have had. He grew up in a home where hard physical and mental work was as natural as breathing and where the phrase "I can't" did not exist. The reflex toward hard work seems to have caught hold in him, even if his parents' respect for abstract knowledge did not take root as deeply. Whether Matt's instincts will ever overcome his mental laziness enough to lead him into a position of leadership of other people, remains to be seen. He's still working on that one. 
The Demise of Social Security. This is a subject on which I can rant for hours. I absolutely abhor the politics of the so-called "Social Security System". "System. . . .?" Not hardly . What we've got here is a walking disaster zone, created one piece at a time by people who had only the best of intentions. It's a pity that things aren't going to work out as we once naively hoped. 
The original idea of social security was to create an insurance system protecting the old and the very needy. What we actually got was a disguised welfare program for the well-to-do. The intention was to create a "trust fund" than would help to make a secure retirement for anyone who worked for wages. What we have now is a "transfer fund" whose surplus beyond current-year costs is invested in US government bonds than help finance our yearly budget deficit. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul! 
What we've got going here isn't an insurance program. It's a roulette wheel where the bet has been allowed to ride on faith for the past 40 years. When that wheel slows down and the little white ball drops in the wrong slot, there are going to be some very shocked people in this country. 
Many recipients of social security benefits now draw out of the system over three times what they and their employers have "contributed", plus compounded interest. The difference between past contributions and present benefits naturally comes from somewhere: our kids are paying it in steadily rising social security taxes and monetary inflation. 
Likewise, a large fraction of benefits goes to the most financially secure people in society.	Late in 1991, about forty million individuals or married couples over age 62 received benefits, with an average monthly benefit of about $630 for individuals, or $1072 for couples who both had an employment history. However, of all households headed by someone 65 or over, about 19% had incomes in excess of $35,000 dollars. What this means is that well over a million households receiving social security also have income exceeding $25,000 per year from other sources. 
According to statistics than the US Government keeps on itself, Social Security now pays over $180 billion per year to retired persons. However, the bottom tenth of recipients by income level receives only 3% of total benefits, while the top tenth gets a whopping 20%. [See US Department of Health and Human Services “Income of the Population 55 and Over”, 1984, revised December 1985, Table 20, 22 and 26; and more recent statistics in the Statistical Abstract of the United States]. 
It doesn't require a genius to conclude that something is awfully screwed up about the way we distribute Social Security. We give a lot of it to people who already have the most security! And most of what we give these people is tax free. In the meantime, we are taxing our children out of their savings. It seems to me that there is a basic inequity in this arrangement. 
There are a few people who have for years predicted the collapse of the social security system. Most of us didn't want to listen. But our kids are sooner or later going to wake us up with a rousing "no more!” as their social security taxes climb steadily over 20%. Before that happens, we are obliged in the name of simple fair play to at least try to put our house in order. 
We are going to have to realize that social security isn't insurance. It is a social welfare program whose first obligation ought to be to preserve some minimum standard of living for truly needy people. As an absolute minimum, we must stop paying benefits to relatively wealthy people who have already drawn out their previous contributions. It seems to me that it would be fair to reduce all benefit payments for people who have other income over $50,000 per year, dropping social security contributions to zero when other income is over (say) $70,000. While we're injecting some fairness into the system, we might also consider weighting Cost of Living increases heavily toward the lowest end of the benefit scale, and away from the highest end. 
	If you detect an overtone of emotion in my discussion of the Social Security system, you've heard correctly. I've got a personal investment in the subject. I have experienced first hand, the agony of watching aging parents struggle to meet huge medical bills, after a lifetime of sweat labor. My mother died a few years ago, after two massive strokes and two years of custodial care in a rehabilitation center and two rest homes. After her first stroke, I managed the payout on her medical bills: Medicare covered about $60,000 during the first awful three months, and the remaining $15,000 wiped out their life savings. 
	Thus I have personally lived with a constant moral dilemma: how to divide financial resources between my kids, my parents and retirement security for Ann and myself. Dad is now in his 80's, living with one of my brothers.	After several mild strokes, he is incontinent and only occasionally lucid. He has prostate cancer, now in remission. Nursing home care for my Dad will cost over $2,500 dollars per month when he can no longer be cared for in my brother's home. Less than a year will wipe out my Dad's remaining savings as well as a large chunk of mine. 
	At the same time, Ann’s kids and my daughter Caroline are struggling to get started. Matt and Kate may never own homes of their own unless Ann and I help out. Now will somebody tell me: just where do I owe my greatest moral and financial obligation? 

	On Public Education: Public schools in America have made more people literate in a shorter period of history than in any other country of the world. Such schools have also begun to encounter a law of diminishing returns. As in a lot of other things we've done during this century, the more education we do under government funding, the less we seem to get for our money. 
	Obviously, there's a lot wrong with the system than results from the relatively low wages we offer teachers. A restaurant manager with six employees earns as much and works shorter hours than a high school math teacher with 30 students per hour. It is said with a degree of justice that to be a teacher, you either have to love it or not be very good at anything else. Unfortunately, a lot of people now teaching seem to fall into the latter category. 
	A lot of ideas are being thrown around about what we can do to improve American education. Some of them have merit. Some advocates say we really should be testing our high school juniors and seniors for basic competence in skills before giving them diplomas. Less popular (with teachers) are initiatives to test teacher competence, reward "master teachers" with increased pay, and require inadequate teachers to improve or find other employment.
	Several years ago, Milton Friedman proposed another idea for dealing with the mess. I haven't heard very much about it lately, but he suggested we could create an incentive for greater excellence in public schools if we distributed school taxes to parents in the form of educational vouchers. Parents could then enroll their students and surrender their educational vouchers to schools or teachers known for their excellence, presumably weeding out less competent schools by the force of market choices. 
	Educational vouchers have never really been tried on a large scale. I suspect that the main reason why not is that very few schools in our inner cities are better than mediocre. To find excellence, kids would have to go to private schools or into the suburbs. Both are expensive alternatives to public mediocrity. Such alternatives tend to be popular with parents less concerned with excellence than with racial purity or religiously evangelical teaching. 
	For the concerned parent, I would offer no sweeping solution for the ills of public education. I would suggest, however, that you ask yourself how recently you have read a book with your child; how many books do your children see you read at hone; how many televisions do you own, and how much of the time are they on? Answers to those questions may give you some idea how much trouble your kids are really in. Education starts where they spend most of their time: at home.
 	If you think your kids lack attention span, then ask yourself how much attention they are required to dedicate to understanding the half-hour brainless television morality plays we call "situation comedy" 
 About Race Relations. Not withstanding forty years of active pursuit of the goal, we are still not an integrated society. I believe that if anything, America is becoming more divided on the issue of race, rather than less. It seems to me that we've tried to find an "easy way" to do some really difficult collective growing up. We've ignored accumulating evidence that Mother Nature and cultural evolution possibly do not favor or even permit such shortcuts. I suggest that equality of opportunity is not well served by the kind of numbers game than we commonly see being played out with respect to job entry, promotions, and the proliferating regulations and quotas than Federal agencies seem disposed to enforce in a lot of work places. An attitude of indifference to discrimination based on skin color or gender is likewise untenable. Somewhere between these two extremes, it seems to me that our culture has to come to grips with more basic issues like human competence. 
It is neither financially nor academically sensible to run our schools with a goal of "equal color exposure" for school children. We continue to transport kids over hour-long routes by the hundreds of thousands, in pursuit of this goal. That is a waste of educational money at a time when waste is ill afforded. Integrated education must have something to do with what is taught and how it is taught, if the result is to be more than an equal opportunity for students to pass through school in non-performing mediocrity. 
It also seems to me that we're going to have to become a good deal more careful in our claims of massive job discrimination and so-called "racism" in American society. Available data suggest that the degree of job discrimination than exists in America is l1P.lch less pronounced than is commonly believed. George Guilder (Wealth and Poverty, Basic Books, NY 1981) offers some of this data for our consideration. Other authors and newspaper columnists (some of them by no means of Lilly white background) have also spoken out. William Raspberry and Thomas Sowell come to mind. 
One of the misleading statistics used to suggest racism, for instance, is the disparity between income levels of blacks and whites. What is forgotten here is that blacks as a group are considerably younger than whites and thus have lower earning capacity. After accounting for such effects, what we see is not that blacks necessarily earn less than whites in comparable jobs, but that blacks are under-represented in high paying jobs.
This under-representation has multiple causes, of which outright exclusion may simply not be high on the list. Also important is the fact that many blacks do not complete adequate schooling to prepare for higher paying jobs. 
I've heard a lot of excuses offered for the relatively poor condition of the "permanent black under-class" in America. Their problem is social environment. Or their problem is that they are "disadvantaged"	Though I acknowledge that such influences do exist and do cause handicaps, I'm no longer impressed by the common excuses. I'm not impressed because I've seen other groups in America who have faced and conquered the same disadvantages, while persons of color have not.  Moreover, to my sensibilities, entirely too many persons of color seem to derive their positions of leadership in black communities by promoting a sort of permanent "victim mentality" in their followers: "It ain't your fault that you don't got nothin'. The White Power structure did this to you, and the White Power structure ain't never gonna' let you rise up!" 
 	I believe a useful comparison can be made to the situation of destitute farmers of the Great Depression years, or to Cuban and Vietnamese immigrants of the 1970's. In both cases, large numbers of people arrived in American cities without employment and lacking key skills for the new situation in than they found themselves. In both cases, a common process occurred. 
People took any job they could find. They lived in crowded conditions, worked long hours and just plain suffered. But they suffered in order to save enough to educate their children or to start a small business of their own. Many older adults re-educated themselves even as they worked to educate their children. They learned to speak and read a new language. They believed in themselves, not in their disadvantages, and that belief bore fruit. The hard work of the first generation was a basis for solid achievements by the second. Then the second generation created prosperity and employment for itself by the millions, often in the same inner cities than African Americans have come to see as an inescapable prison. 
I have worked side by side with the employed poor; with blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans digging ditches in the hard-pan soil of the California hills. There was a difference between us: they were of first -generation American poor, and I was of the second. These men were semi-literate, still deeply connected to a southern or Latino culture than sometimes values individual personal excellence less than machismo. But these men valued their wives and children. More than one of them worked at two jobs, saving for the years and the opportunities ahead. 
The children of such men and women will continue to move out of poverty in a generation -- if we don't deny their fathers useful work by raising the minimum wage high enough to eliminate their jobs. The children are also are more likely integrate into the American main stream, if we resist the stupid notion that they should not be required to learn the language and value system of the adopted social culture where they now live. That value system has produced the prosperity they aspire to. 
I do not know precisely why the process of assimilation and achievement has not occurred to the same degree for African Americans as it has for other minority groups in America. I can only see pieces of causes. One of those causes is almost certainly a high rate of family disintegration and illegitimate births among poor blacks. As George Guilder and others have pointed out -- often to cries of outrage -- this disintegration has not been accidental. 
There is ample evidence that the economic rewards of various social welfare programs have much to do with a cycle of dependency and irresponsibility. When a mother can "earn" more for her four illegitimate children than her lovers can earn in low-skill minimum wage jobs, it should not surprise us that she has more children and her lovers have little interest in "settling down" to a reduced family income. When economics persistently oppose moral behavior, don't bet on morals. 
If this cycle is ever to be broken, it seems to me that some of our rules for publicly funded charity must change. We've got to stop creating incentives for family disintegration. One large step in this direction might be to deny public support for the second and subsequent children born out of wedlock. Another step would be to refuse support to mothers who are unwilling to name a father for their children. Though I realize I invite outrage in this observation, it seems to me that any man who has fathered two or more illegitimate children, has done enough damage for one generation. Compulsory sterilization would be a fair though admittedly perilous and incomplete remedy. 
About the "Drug Culture". I've grown up with a generation of people said to be involved in a "drug culture". That term strikes me as an inherent contradiction. Culture is concerned with creating and passing on values. Drugs are utterly destructive to that end. 
Whether one is involved in the so-called recreational use of marijuana, popping pills, sniffing cocaine, zonking-out on alcohol, or tripping on LSD or mescaline, I firmly believe that the user is simply running away from normal experience. Normal experience carries with it, a measure of pain. The user flees pain for a comfortable blankness. 
Though it was fashionable in the early 1970s to speak of "consciousness expanding" drugs, I have seen no evidence that drug users ever expanded themselves in any noticeable way. I see no new art than maybe attributed to the experiences of those who have indulged in their own private light shows. I see no literature of significance to future generations, no music to stand the test of contemplation. To the contrary, I see in drug users and their entertainments, a consistent hostility toward life and toward other people; a failure of purpose and perception; an unwillingness to communicate, to think, to cope with life as we commonly experience it. 
Because drugs have become pervasive, I realize that I shall occasionally come into contact with people who abuse them. That is unavoidable. As I have grown older, however, my attitude with respect to drunks and dopers has hardened. Recognizing that such people have real problems with life, I have also come to believe that for large numbers of them the problems can never be solved. It is also very difficult to distinguish those who are already lost, from those who maybe reclaimable. 
Thus, I have arrived at a basic attitude toward substance abusers: I may be willing to participate in your solution, but I am not willing to be part of your problem. When you spend time with me, plan on being clean and sober. If you seek my long term interest and involvement as a friend, plan on staying that way. I will not tolerate drugs or the evidence of drugs in my work place, in my home, or in my personal associations with individuals. If I ever observe you trying to offer or sell such substances to others, I will do my absolute best to put you in jail and keep you there. 
As far as I am concerned, the dealer in addictive substances is one of the few characters in common life that fully deserves to be crucified, disemboweled, and left to rot in a public square. 
There are alternatives to drugs, for those who wish to explore a less linear and rational perspective. Both Eastern and Western teachers have used various forms of meditation to reach ecstatic states. The modern psychotherapies, however flawed they maybe in other respects, provide an active exploration of dreams and visions (derived as these experiences are from our least understood selves). Some teachers also propose to train perception of the paranormal. 
It is complained that such methods take time. I agree that they do, and it is well that they do. If the eager disciple is unwilling to offer up his effort and time for the practice of an uncommon perception, then I must doubt the depth of his motivation. Did he wish an expansion of consciousness and the inevitable changes of living awareness that follow from a changed point of view? Or did he merely wish to be entertained? 
About Gadgets. Americans are gadget lovers. Ask anyone who sells stereo sound equipment. Better yet, ask any Japanese camera maker. We are adding computer hardware to our homes at an unprecedented rate. We buy our power amplifiers by the tens of watts per channel. We love our video games. 
I admit that even though I am an engineer and should know better, I have occasionally been caught by gadget mania. Not too long ago, I owned a perfectly good compact stereo than combined an FM tuner, turntable, and cassette recorder. Then my son brought home a DC-to-Light 65 watt per channel amplifier and cassette recorder. He wanted a machine to play his metal tapes. 
Shortly thereafter, I caught the bug. I found a sale on stereo equipment and came home with a new AM/FM receiver, stereo cassette player, a "good" turntable, and two medium sized loudspeakers. The whole shooting match cost a mere $800. Then I found I "needed" a cabinet for the components. Throw in another $150 for a component rack. 
I plugged the pieces together and compared them to my original compact stereo center, just before selling the compact. I got a few surprises. My new receiver was definitely more selective. I could tune in stations somewhat more clearly than before. The new record table definitely has better speed regulation ("Wow" and ''Flutter'') than the one I replaced. The cassette recorder, if I turn the system up loud enough to rattle the windows, has a lower level of background hiss when compared to the old system.  But I never could hear the $1. 50 difference between chromium dioxide and metal tapes -- at least, not at any volume I wanted to live with. 
Only one more small thing bothers me. The new receiver has audio power meters among its controls. Using these meters, I have learned that when my new speakers are rattling the dust in my neighbor's bedroom closets, my receiver is oomping out a little less than one watt per channel. Even making allowances for sharp peak sounds in the music, I doubt I will ever need more than the 15 watts of instantaneous power than my old compact stereo center provided. I wonder if I wouldn't have been a little better off -- and about $500 richer -- if I had merely bought a better pair of loudspeakers and hooked them to the old compact. 
After I bought the stereo system, I became interested in home computers. I have since been through two word processors, having arrived at a "nice" home system with 8 megabytes of RAM, a 325 megabyte hard disk, SVGA color display and dot matrix printer. My wife won't touch the thing. She swears it harbors an evil spirit than demands nightly input. That seems to have something to do with the amount of time I have spent writing this book.... 
About Fur Persons. Having coexisted for much of my life with cats as neighbors and co-habitués, I am perhaps entitled to have a few opinions concerning felines. I tentatively offer the proposition that cats maybe a very special form of reincarnated being. They've re-entered this earthly existence with the knowledge that they are special -- though whether they are very wise old souls or simply crazy is sometimes hard to determine. Some of the Siamese I have known have been crazy.
	My family shared its digs for over 10 years with a sixteen pound ball of fur who went variously by the name "Brandy", or "Blimp". He answered to Brandy when he felt like it. His moniker became Blimp when he took a flying leap and landed in my lap just after I had opened a newspaper. In either case, he was un-ignorable.
Brandy chewed on our spider plants and then assumed an air of wounded dignity when we suggested that he really didn't belong on the window sill or dining roan table. We buttered his paws regularly, because that seemed to be the only way to grease the fur balls out of his enormous system. This treatment, he accepted with calm -- and a glare than could cut glass at ten yards. 
Brandy had definite ideas about people. He tolerated his immediate family, deeming them useful house servants. Visitors, once they stopped inconveniently moving around, were a curiosity to be investigated. Those who didn't like cats were likely to leave with a new fur coat on their stockings and pants. Visitors who did like cats, were treated to a purr that rivaled my Uncle Spence when he revved up the chain saw. This cat was also fond of laps, and the bigger the better. He would knead his front paws into almost any yielding surface offered. We were unsuccessful in teaching him to distinguish between male bay windows and female balconies. 
Brandy shared his home with another feline. Our female Max -- short for "Maximum Maxine" -- managed to dominate him thoroughly, when she bothered. Mostly, she didn't bother unless he became obnoxious. Max had her own agenda and roost of the time that agenda was hunting. Despite many unhappy scenes with Ann, Max regularly hauled home critters: young birds, field mice, rabbits, and once the larger part of a king snake. 
Maximum Maxine, over time, convinced me that there may be something to claims of mental telepathy in animals. She knew what we are thinking, but didn't pay much attention unless it would really inconvenience her. 
Ann and I have lived on the outskirts of a number of large towns and cities. Thus Max got to be very much at home in small wood lots. So much at home, in fact, that she once made a habit of staying out all night, particularly when snow was about to fly. Then, at three in the I1VJrning, she would sit woefully on our back porch (two flights down) and tell the world that these people whom she owned were being unbearably cruel to her. 
This routine eventually grated on my nerves. So I placed a small shelter under the rear steps, to house our little night prowler whenever she got back from her wanderings. We put a favorite furry rug in the shelter and gently placed the cat repeatedly inside, by way of introduction. Naturally, she ignored the place. 
Then came a night with snowflakes in the air. Max asked "out???" at the door, and I looked down at her sternly. "OK, cat, you know the rules. If you don't come when I ring on your dinner dish, you’re going to get a case of cold feet. Capice?"  She sniffed in disdain as she flumped out into the cold. 
Half an hour later, I rang on her bowl. No cat. Then I sat down for a few moments and mentally visualized our furred friend. I spoke to this vision in my mind, telling her that if she didn't come when I rang on her bowl again, she was going to stay out all night, harangues or no. That was what her porch shelter was for. 
I walked to the door. With the second strike of the spoon on her bowl, Maxie shot through my legs in a flash of brown and gold. She sat in a comer of the kitchen and glared over her shoulder as she groomed her feet. The Queen of Sheba had been admonished and didn't like it one bit. However, she did not stay out again when called, as long as we lived in that house. She heard me each time. 
To my knowledge, the only time Max used the porch shelter was during an occasional hot summer afternoon, when she wanted a bit of time off from chasing field mice. The rest of the time, I think she sublet the place to a family of Opossums. 
Now, the porch shelter gets an occasional visit from new fur friends who are not quite as selective in their taste. Brandy and Maximum Max have gone to whatever reward is offered for shorter-lived souls who share and enrich human life and then die. Missy is occasionally confused by being called Maxie. And Moses, in his large and burly way, reminds me of his former playmate. It's been three years since we lost our two friends to two different feline forms of cancer. And even with new friends, we still miss the older ones. 
A word about hope. Before she was two years old, I lost my daughter, Caroline, in a divorce than felt like a spiritual death. Some feminists might say that I "walked away from" Caroline, because I lacked the strength of character to fight with my ex-wife to continue visiting our year-old child. I cannot say with any conviction that such a condemnation is completely wrong. I can only respond that at the time, I didn't have a lot of hope for establishing a positive relationship with Caroline in the face of her mother’s angry determination to deny that outcome. 
This did not mean, however, that I gave up hope of eventually knowing the person into whom this little girl would one day grow. For several years, I sent Christmas cards to Caroline and to her mother and adoptive father. When the family moved without declaring a forwarding address, I continued sending cards or a Christmas newsletter to the Bainbridges, Caroline's maternal grandparents. I talked occasionally with Caroline's uncle, though I refrained from attempting to make him or his parents my "agents" with respect to Caroline. 
Eighteen years later, my mother was dying and knew that she was dying. After the first of the strokes than eventually killed her, Man asked me to take care of her wedding rings and an anniversary ring than Dad had given her, "just in case".  If she died, she wanted the granddaughter whom she had not seen in several years to have her jewelry. 
A year later, I would honor her wish. 
I wrote the Bainbridges, to explain my mother’s bequeath. They responded warmly, expressing regret at the passing of a lady whom they had liked greatly but known only briefly, and informing me that Caroline would soon be graduating from junior college. If I wished to offer her a gift appropriate for her age, they would convey that gift to Caroline. Thus the stones and metal of mother’s rings were transformed by a goldsmith into a pendant and dinner ring. 
With the gift, I sent a short note of explanation and invitation, warning the Bainbridges of what I intended to do and inviting them to read my offering before delivering it. The note made clear that if Caroline was interested in a more personal knowledge of me and of my life since her birth, I would be open to such a contact. Likewise, recognizing that Ellen might still harbor ill feelings, I would not invade Caroline's privacy or that of her parents, without invitation. I also sent the Bainbridges a longer letter to be held for Caroline until a time when she might ask them for more information about me. 
After her graduation, I received a short note in a cramped adolescent hand. Caroline appreciated my gift and hesitantly expressed the wish that in some future year we might get to know each other better. However, I must understand that her mother was extremely upset with the whole idea of my having contact with Caroline. While living at home, it would not be practical for us to meet or to correspond. 
A year passed. Caroline talked with her grandparents and received my longer letter. We finally talked for an hour by phone, during her visit at the Bainbridge's.
She was profoundly tentative in this contact, and I encouraged her to set her own pace. If possible, she should avoid conflict with her parents. A few months later, after much planning and struggle, Caroline entered a University program, a few hundred miles from hare. Learning where she was registered, I searched phone books and student rosters until I located her. I sent another letter directly to her college apartment. It would be the first of many. In the two years since our initial tentative contact, a relationship has gradually unfolded between Caroline, me, and Ann. It is a connection than I treasure, in which 18 years of patient waiting have been validated in full.  
Caroline has twice spent vacations with Ann and nee I have visited Caroline's campus, net her boyfriend, and talked many evenings into the morning hours, about past and present and potential future.  We exchange frequent letters by electronic nail and "snail nail" (US Postal Service). I am helping her research graduate schools and prepare for a year in training as a teacher. It is rare for more than two weeks to pass without an hour-long coast-to-coast phone call. 
In this connection, I have requested that Caroline honor some important understandings. My purpose is to add to her life and my own, not to detract from her parents' lives. I will share my thoughts with her concerning how Ellen may once have thought and felt -- but I do not claim to know Caroline's mother after 20 years, and I cannot judge her motives except in the most general sense. Caroline does not always hear from me what she wants to hear -- but she will always hear my respect for her right to seek out her own journeys and define her own destinations. 
As we have to know each other, Caroline's trust has steadily broadened. She has learned that there is literally no subject about than she cannot talk with me or with Ann, for fear of hurt or offense. This has not been true of her relationship to the parents who raised her, for a variety of reasons. Caroline and her mother are each very strong women -- and they are fundamentally different types of people in their values and personalities. This has not proven to be a happy combination. 
My advice to my daughter has consistently been "care about and love the lady who raised you, but live by your own values and learn your own lessons. Recognize her strengths and her contributions to your life. But you need not accept her limitations as your own. Care about the man who adopted you as his daughter and who has worked hard to support you. But understand that not all men express their feelings well; any man with whom you hope or expect to live as lover and companion had better have that skill." 
I have shared some elements of this process with friends who are estranged from their own children for various reasons. Though I know that there are no universal solutions or happy endings, I can confidently offer some small comfort: miracles do happen, though perhaps we do not make them happen. Permit your miracles to come to you, and let them take whatever form they will. Live with authenticity to your own values. Live with caring. Leave roan for hope, even as you relinquish expectation. But leave room for hope.