Henrietta Hay's Column

"Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the flowers gone? Long time ago...The girls have picked them every one. Oh when will they ever learn? Oh when will they ever learn?"

Even columnists get sentimental from time to time, and the tribute to Pete Seeger during the Kennedy Center Honors program just about did me in. Put together my favorite folk song and my all time favorite folk singer, middle-aged and graying now but with her voice still as strong and true as ever. Add a very dramatic setting and you have Joan Baez dressed in black, standing alone with her guitar on a darkened stage in a single spot and singing Where have all the flowers gone?

I have heard those haunting final words, "When will we ever learn?" over and over in my head through the many years since Pete Seeger wrote it and Joan sang it for the first time. It was a song of the sixties, a song of sadness for a war most of us did not want and of hope that some good might come out of it.

When we think of the sixties we think of flower children and war protesters, of youth, which thought it, would never grow old. As a parent of one of those protesters, I watched those years sometimes with bemusement, but mostly with a sort of envy, wishing I were thirty years younger. There was an idealism about that generation which has not been equaled in the generations since, and it was reflected in their songs. The songs have lasted, but the idealism has become a bit frayed with age. I can only hope it is still there. This is the generation of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

We have been protesting against something or other ever since. There is a difference, though. My friend the philosopher says that her generation was protesting against institutionalized violence. It was ideological more than personal. They were chiefly concerned with oppressed peoples - somewhere else.

Today we are facing personalized violence. When we feel threatened personally it's different. Then it was Watts. Today it's the L. A. riots. Then was napalm across the sea. Today it's killing in the streets at home. The same week that I drifted off into lovely reverie with Joan Baez was the week of the story that makes me wonder whether we ever will learn.

This year there have been many horror stories, from wars and slaughter, to child murder, to the 1994 election, to a football playing wife-beater running around in a white Bronco, all the way down to the cancellation of the Palm Beach cotillion because there were only six debutantes.

But a company in Alabama lifts us to a new high in horror. It is proud to introduce a new bullet, which makes a true art out of killing people. The executive officer of this forward thinking, humanitarian company says, "The beauty behind it is that it makes an incredible wound. There is no way to stop the bleeding." There are a couple of big advantages to these bullets, so they tell us. They fragment and will not go through one body into a second one, thus eliminating the danger of killing two for the price of one. And they will penetrate bulletproof vests, chiefly worn by law enforcement officers.

Now any good sixties protester would scream to the Heavens over something like this. In 1994 I have not heard much reaction, although Federal regulators say the bullets won't be approved for at least another month. They don't say for what. Several members of Congress are preparing to introduce legislation to ban them. We can expect government to move with majestic speed.

Maybe the reason we can't get worked up about the horrors in Bosnia is that we are worried about surviving fragmentation bullets in the U. S.

I've been on this planet a long time in good times and bad and I have seen people rise to the occasion more often than not. Pete is still smiling, Joan is still singing, and I am still an idealist. I believe that civilization will survive. But I do have to ask "When will we ever learn?"

We'll never learn as long as we feel safer by shooting than by understanding and caring.