Henrietta Hay's Column

I have been on an archaeological dig, not in the desert, but in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet - the repository of odds and ends from past human life as recorded on paper.

I discovered that my urge to write started a long time ago, as I found a story I wrote in the 4th grade. For all the "let's go back to the good old days of education" rhetoric, it was neither better than nor worse than a story written by a 4th grader today. Possibly the major difference is that mine was written in pencil on lined paper, while today's would be composed on a computer and printed on a laser printer. In any case, it is obvious that I inherited my pack rat tendencies from my mother.

The real treasure of this excavation is a mixed collection of slightly yellowed newspaper clippings several decades old. What they prove once again is that we do not learn from history, but keep repeating our mistakes.

Sydney J. Harris was one of my favorite columnists. He wrote, "I suggest that we step back a few paces from the current scene of unrest, of dissent and defiance, and confrontation and protest. When we do -- when we acquire a little emotional distance as well as physical distance -- I think we will find a common thread running through the whole picture." That was not written in January of 1996, but on January 4, 1970.

In a column from the early 70's Ellen Goodman was discussing the first woman president -- not when but who -- with Elizabeth Janeway. "Swallow hard... the First Woman will be a conservative Republican who believes in the status-quo . . . She will firmly disassociate herself from feminism, about which she will be thoroughly, purposefully ignorant . . . The power structure will ... choose the women who look and sound like they do, except that their three-piece suits come with skirts. They will look for the woman who does not threaten innovation except by her presence." Sound familiar twenty-five years later?

James A. Michener wrote a full page in the Denver Post January 4, 1981. He started with, "Repeatedly since the election my conservative friends have made sport of the severe defeat suffered by us liberals and have asked, 'Do you surrender? Do you admit your attitudes are defunct?' Not at all. I quarried my attitudes painfully from the granite of long experience . . . I would be ashamed of myself if I were suddenly to abandon those hard won conclusions." He discussed in detail the problems facing America in that year. "In all the situations I have been discussing the voice of the liberal is needed. He or she brings sanity, humanity and compassion into the argument and it is upon such values that great nations exist. For the liberal to be silenced now, when he or she is needed most, would be a grievous mistake."

In one of the yellowed clippings, Art Buchwald turned his fiendish humor on the new Right. 'The new threat to the country, if you believe the Moral Majority, is not the communists but "secular humanists . . . the hunt for is on. No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot . . . Librarians and teachers must be made to answer for the books they have on their shelves. Publishers must be held accountable for what they print. Writers must be punished for what they write. . . They can no longer hide behind the First Amendment. If we're going back to the old moral values that made this country great, we're going to have to do it with search and destroy methods. First, we must burn the books. And if that isn't enough, then we must burn the people."

Pete Hamill writing in the New York Post on November 17, 1969 bade farewell to the sixties on the morning after the anti-war march on Washington. "Finally on a cold bright Sunday morning with ... the bitter smell of tear gas replaced again by burning leaves ... it was over. All of it. And it is unlikely that we will see anything like it again."

The more things change the more they stay the same. I suspect we will enter the 21st century not much wiser than we were when we entered the 20th.

1997