A FACULTY COMMENTARY

THE events of May at Dartmouth, epochal for the College, cannot mislead the Strikers from their main goal: the liberation of the oppressed. On May 18, when these words are being written after a fortnight none of us will ever forget, the crisis has been little affected by our work. In the second week of the Strike several hundred Gl's, thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians, and eight blacks were killed.

Well, then, was it worth it? When teachers asked each day, as if watching a patient, "How are you doing?" (Why not "we"?), when students pointed out that other students lost their enthusiasm or took off, a demoralizing perspective rose before the strikers, a perspective of faintheartedness.

The fact is most people can't stand Movement work, and we shouldn't be surprised. The average Vietnamese, sympathetic to the N.L.F., stays uninvolved when he can, while most blacks, admiring the Panthers, do so from afar. Movement work is upsetting, extraordinary, conceivably violent, and unpredictable. I believe that the unpredictability cannot be overemphasized. However desperate, fearful, or furious, most men and women lead regular lives. Movement work takes them away from home, family, friends, work and even from their usual enemies.

For many whites, then, the occasional glimpses behind the curtain shielding them from reality are scary as hell. Kent State provided a recent jolt; the murders of Schwerner and Goodwin in Neshoba County are older. Joseph McCarthy inquisitions terrified one gen- eration, the Spock and Chicago trials unnerve a second. Then, on TV and in Life, we see what Uncle Sam produces when you really threaten him: a million dead Vietnamese, killed in order to prevent a bloodbath.

The resistance of Hanover whites to full participation in the Strike and especially their opposition to the "second demand" (to stop domestic oppression) reveal something profoundly human: it is "better" - more numbing, less painful - to assert that supporting the Panthers is "bad politics" than to admit what happens to anyone who gets too close to that furnace door.

Assistant Professor of Chinese