Wesleyan University - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Middletown, CT)

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66 Injustice, useless suffering and the senseless waste of human potential address us directly with the question: What kind of a people are we becoming? You cannot escape the question, it is addressed specifically to you. And the quality of your response is the quality of your becoming. Of course there are no easy answers, no grand schemes which will set the world curight in a moment or a lifetime. The persistent fact of injustice undercuts the lofty claims of our favor- ite ideologies. Planned brutality reveals the powers of darkness within and without and out- lines the limits of the intellect's powers. But some things are clear. We know we can no longer believe, if we ever really did, that the grand aim of life is the development of ever more sophisticated consumers of our industrial product. And despite our ethical confusion, we know some things that are good and some that are wrong. Segregation is wrong, flat out wrong, brutality is wrong, inhumanity is wrong. Love is good, the iust ordering of society is good, integrity is good, a free and ioyful spirit is good. Furthermore, we know now that we can act and that our actions can make a difterence. The choice is not between thinking and doing. The choice is between involvement and indifference, between concern and callousness. Thoughless action may do great harm, indif- ferent inaction will do great harm. Concerned thinking is doing, concerned doing is thinking. We are called by the events of the world to do the good that we know, to participate in the struggle for a better life for all, to risk the suHering of involvement. We are called to share in ioy of being genuinely useful, of participating in the processes which determine the shape and meaning of our life together. We are called to be for others. That is our freedom. 5. H. Newcomer