Teach-In II Of Sin and Sanders

ONE THING was perfectly clear: not even the unimaginable evil of this war has taught us to fear ourselves. Charles Price led a prayer for "wisdom, courage, compassion, and justice." There were those who hissed the mere insinuation that the solution might lie hidden among such an elevation of platitudes.

Over twenty-five hundred of us had crowded Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, and Lowell Lec- only twenty-five hundred, for exhilaration must not be sought in mere numbers. One wonders why they had even bothered to come. Surely not for information's sake. The whole pretense of ? "teaching" was a sham. That phase of the peace movement had pretty much ended back in '66, back before many of us had worked out our need to fight against the war. We had never had to "learn" about the war. We had grown up in hating it.

Possibly some came as if to attend a revival. Somewhere, somehow, one sought an antidote to despair. If only to prove Time magazine wrong, we had to show that we weren't cooling it, that our anger had also multiplied while it festered.

But revivals, one quickly learns, cry out for the consensus of a homogeneous congregation that will respond to the preacher's demands. "Well, here we are again," Michael Walzer began. But it didn't work. His "we" was too highly suspect, for the only common denominator in the hall was a common distrust. One turned to his neighbor and, instead of a reassuring glance, found him virtually unrecognizable. How could those in front of you applaud McCarthy? Why did those in back not hiss down Riegle? Walzer himself, however expertly, played the game, balancing the boos and hisses off against the applause.

It was a slow and painful night. And although one watched the parade of speakers closely, it was easier not to listen to their words. The usual repulsion one felt when faced with this country's atrocities, the usual outrage in discovering the government to be wrenched form our grasp, were both there. But a new hatred had entered the picture. A hatred of each other for not seeing "the obvious solutions" with equal clarity.

Not only did we fail to forge alliances, we could not even center on the issues around which we would struggle. The conflict lacked definition, and so the climax, and hence resolution, never even appeared. Gene, so pallid and pathetic after Bella's explosive challenge, mumbled on of Consequences and their Causes and Consequences being one. And smiled in appreciation of his own scholastic wit.

While the rest of us, whether PL or Young Republican or rising young politico or tired, liberal cynic, merely mirrored his games in our own distorting mirrors. We all had run the race, we all laid claim to the prize, while the killing in Indochina, immune to our debate over the meaning of "End the War." went irrevocably on.

One last hope not in our ability to end the war, but in our ability to maintain our own humanity in doing so. After all, our crusade-albeit its exact nature was a matter of contention-we all defined, however variously, as a holy one. And yet the crowded air of Sanders smothered one in the ugliness of hostility and scorn. The steam that gushed from a punctured radiator seemed only a metaphor for the little patience that prevailed.

Yet, for all one's disappointment and disgust-for despair was much too passive to survive the night-the "Teach-In" held its lessons. Bella Abzug brought with her enough good-natured fury to turn even the hisses and bullshits into calls of affirmation. Chomsky exhibited a quiet knowledgeability that one found refreshingly reassuring. Cynthia Fredericks spoke with concern instead of rhetoric. Perhaps these then were the people who could lead us form the hall.

But not before Tom Wicker had tried to instill in us a sense of sin. (Sin, of course, not being part of our "modern" consciousness, it was easy to misunderstand his words. After all, how could one see in PL's self-righteousness the self-aggrandizement of American capitalism, how could the liberals be brought to see their complicity in bureaucratic deception, how could any of us purge ourselves of self-serving self-righteousness?) "I believe with Faulkner that the basis of all things is to be afraid," Wicker said. "If we believe that only success matters, then we have failed before we begin."