‘Grow Up America’

Steel decries America’s immature attitudes and denials of the realities of the real world. He describes the emotional, popular reaction to the recent hostage-taking activities as sentimental, naive and dangerous.

I am amazed that Steel should be so critical of a syndrome that merely reflects an overriding system of psychic denial of enormous proportions. Our continuing denial of the risks associated with the direct or indirect application of violence in the resolution of conflict has enormously appalling consequences. It makes any romanticizing of the hostage issue pale to insignificance.

Two facts dominate all human relations in today’s world:

1--Continued pursuit of international goals through processes that admit to the acceptability, for whatever reason, of resolution of conflict through violence will inevitably result in thermonuclear war.

2--Thermonuclear war, when it occurs, will result in the total annihilation of all life on this planet.

These facts enjoy such high credibility and are being voiced in so many corners of our world by so many competent scientists and statesmen that it is only through the most heroic efforts of denial that we are able to convince ourselves that “business as usual” is an acceptable activity. No longer can these statements be considered flights of fancy by fuzzy-headed pacifists. They are made frighteningly tangible by 60,000 nuclear warheads poised for mutual destruction. Their certainties of occurence are supported by the lessons of history and competent technological prediction.

They form the basis of a substantial shift in reality that demands, on penalty of total destruction, that we change the way that we think. This new reality requires that we recognize that war and annihilation are one in the same thing.

THOMAS RYAN

San Diego