Word: dissenters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NOTHING more dramatically illustrated the dissent in the Administration's own inner circle than the letter that Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel wrote to the President last week. Leaked to the press even before Nixon had seen it, it criticized him for alienating the nation's youth and isolating himself from the Cabinet. "I believe this Administration finds itself today embracing a philosophy which appears to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans -our young people," wrote Hickel. Other Hickel observations...
...among the spectators caught in the rifle fire. An honor student interested in the history of art, she believed in protest but not in violence. She had placed a flower in a Guardsman's rifle at Kent State and said softly: "Flowers are better than bullets." "Is dissent a crime?" asked Allison Krause's father. "Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her Government...
WORDS, like trees, bend with the prevailing winds. In the climate of opinion of the past few years, the word dissent has undergone a decided transformation. For most of U.S. history, it clearly meant speech-the unorthodox opinion, the challenging idea. Then, during the 1960s, civil rights protesters took to the streets to fight segregation, and the word became associated with demonstrations as much as with speech. As protests have continued to broaden and increase, dissent has come to be used to describe and defend a wide variety of physical acts, including violence toward property and even toward people...
...explanation many protesters offer for their switch from verbal to physical dissent is that no one pays attention to words alone any longer. However eloquent it has been, however imaginative its uses, language has not succeeded in eliminating racial discrimination or ending the war in Indochina. So the protesters have resorted to what Social Psychologist Franklyn Haiman of Northwestern University calls "body rhetoric"-sit-ins, lie-ins, marches-and more and more bodies have started colliding. Such public confrontations are an expression of gathering frustration over a society that no longer seems to respond to more traditional forms of dissent...
This argument contains a measure of truth. It is also true that in many cases the massed forces of dissent-as at most of last week's rallies mourning the Kent State four-have demonstrated a commendable restraint in not letting verbal protest build into violence. The fact remains, however, that all too often these days dissent is a matter of arson and rock throwing. The reason may be that protesters have despaired of the efficacy of words before they have really mastered them. It is significant that this generation of dissenters has failed to produce a literature...