"I would like to read some words by the Honorable John Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon B. Johnson, having to do with current problems. He says:
"The possibility of coherent community action is diminished today by the deep mutal suspicions and antagonisms among various groups in our national life.
"As these antagonisms become more intense, the pathology is much the same whether the group involved is made up of Black Power advocates, rioting students, rural right-wingers, urban radicals or Southern segregationists. The ingredients are, first, a deep conviction on the part of the group as to its own limitless virtue or the overriding sanctity of its cause; second, grave doubts concerning the moral integrity of all others; third, a chronically aggrieved feeling that power has fallen into the hands of the unworthy (that is, the hands of others).
"Every American knows how widely scattered are those seeds of civic disintegration. We have all heard the conversations where hatred is jsut beneath the surface. We have all listened to the arguments in which difference of opinion becomes defined in terms of unalterable good and evil. We have heard the degrading characterizations of those with whom one disagrees. We have listened to the bigotry of the conservative and the bigotry of the liberal. We hae all observed the steady drop in the level of discourse and behavior.
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: An excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. Such extremism comes easily to men who have doped themselves with delusions of their own unblemished virtue and the rascality of others. Blind belief in one's cause and a low view of the morality of other Americans - these seem mild failings. But they are the soil in which ranker weeds take root - political lunacy, terrorism and the deep, destructive cleavages that paralize society. (No Easy Victories, pp. 8, 9)
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"You young people live in an age when freedom of the mind is supressed over much of the world. We must preserve it in the Church and in America and resist all efforts of earnest men to suppress it, for when it is suppressed, we might lose the liberties vouchsafed in the Constitution of the United Sates.
"Preserve, then, the freedom of your mind in education and in religion, and be unafraid to express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine every proposition. We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts. One may memorize much without learning anything. In this age of speed there seems to be little time for meditation. ...
"Society is indulgent woard young people, but there are limits to permissibility. Youth is right to repudiate sham and hypocrisy, but to assume that disorder and chaos have merit in themselves is to assume that we are no longer capable of reasoning together in search of the right solution. ...
"While we speak of independence and the right to think, to agree or to disagree, to exmaine and to question, we must not foget that fixed and unchanging laws govern in all God's creation, whether it be in the vastness of the starry heavens, or in the minute revolving universe of the atom, or in human relationships. All is law. All is cause and effect, and God's laws are universal. God has no favorites; none is immune from either life's temptations or the consequences of his own deeds. God is not capricious.
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"In other words, it is not merely a matter of conformity to rituals, climbing sacred stairs, bathing in sacred pools, or making pilgrimages to sacred shrines. The depth and height nd quality of life depends upon awareness, and awareness is a prcoess of being saved from ignorance. Man cannot live in ignroance.
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