University of Virginia Library

Sorry, Children

"We're just going to have to say,
'Kids, if you don't have something
to do in Cambridge, then you just
better leave.' I don't like to have to
say it, but that's what it has to be."

Not a bad man, In fact, in many
ways, a good and gentle one, open
and tolerant, possessed of no great
hatreds or needs for them. But the
situation had reached a point where
some degree of shared humanity
receded, some unspoken trust he
had hurled at the world no longer
bounced back. "I used to call myself
a liberal, but now I don't think
I can do that any more," he said.

"Most people would rather see a
blue uniform than someone out of
his mind on drugs," he added glumly.

On the street his decision, with
all the repression that he and the
300-odd merchants in the Square
could cause, shed its ambiguities.
Memory came to the freaks in
Forbes Plaza of countless hassles
and minor confrontations, of nights
in jail, of havens built and destroyed
by madness in other
cities-madness amphetamines, and
the big, brown clubs of cops. The
merchants were bad, and it was
time to fight.

Neither side would accept responsibility.
The Square's eyeball to
eyeball cultural interface grew more
hateful as cops hassled
guitar-players, leather sellers, panhandlers,
underground newspaper
hawkers, and the freaks hassled
straights with hairy eyeballs and
mystic voodoo signs.

More attempts at rioting, met
this time by massive tear-gassing
and frenzied flight, the crowds suddenly,
astonishingly losing their
connections and becoming confused
individuals. Street freaks, radicals,
students, had grown apart in
fear and confusion and now inhabited
the Square in sullen silence,
like winos on the 7th Avenue IRT
at 4:30 a.m.

And in the silence, the news
from elsewhere could suddenly be
heard: policemen dead in Berkeley,
LA, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia;
bombings rampant; shootings
by police in Lawrence, Houston,
and the Los Angeles barrios; a judge
and three blacks riddled with bullets
in San Rafael.

And at the end of the summer,
the mother-blast of them all in
Madison; gasoline and fertilizer in a
panel truck perhaps igniting more
than any Army Math Research Center,
perhaps killing many more than
one. And behind it all, like the
whisperer in darkness, the
unfolding horror of the Manson
trial.

Small wonder then that many
fled from the slum Cambridge had
become. They realized that, long
before the window boards and heroin
and police had done their work
on the Square, Cambridge had become
far worse, a slum, a ghetto of
the mind, where insulation had
filled the mind with fuzz and the
harsh realities became incomprehensible.

Hard thought, rest, communion
with friends and trees, grapplings
with conscience and history would
help free the refugees from their
sleep of reason . The knowledge
that there are more things happening
in this frenzied nation than we
can imagine, that forces set in
motion proceed to some stop,
might fill their minds with a new
caution and a new despair.

No longer can words exist divorced
from their consequences, for
both sides have abandoned restraints,
Everything is done: assassinations,
kidnapping, and the murder
of hostages. The knowledge
brought an end to fantasies of
power and their attendant mythologies.
The faith that could replace
them was not yet born.