Word: wickers
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...Wicker went to Attica as a writer who had asked a few searching questions about his society, but who essentially was loyal to and protective of that society. He came away from Attica's tragedy shaken, stirred, and aware personally for the first time of the depth of racism that lay in his Southern upbringing, of the inhumanity of prisons, of America's reliance on violence as the ultimate recourse, of the power of guns to dictate men's actions...
...Wicker did not then understand that so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting upon the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are in hand, the question of those who have them ultimately becomes. "Why not use them?" The more weapons, the more insistent the question; and the burden of explaining why not to use them falls on those who have no guns. But those who have no guns have little credence with those...
This "we versus they" syndrome is Tom Wicker's theory of violence in America. Puritan theology may be dead, he says, but Puritanism is eternal in its tendency to divide everyone into two opposed camps, the saved and the damned, the forces of light and the forces of dark, we and they. Only "they," the damned, are violent, criminal, savage, inhuman--the Indians in early America; in more recent times, the "gooks and slopes" in Vietnam. "We," on the other hand, the peaceful, law-abiding, want only to develop our civilization without hindrance, are justified in violently suppressing "their" uprisings...
...Wicker's analysis may be simplistic, but it has merit. For instance, it explains the urban warfare of modern America. Police are not brutal or racist when they shoot to kill, or beat up or harrass "violent subhuman beats." They are protecting normal society. They had to get Fred Hampton before he got us. It is not surprising, then, that "they" populate the Atticas of America...
...STORY WICKER tells of America's prisons adds yet another sorry dimension to the Attica tragedy. The Quakers in the late 1700s had the notion that offenders should be locked alone in cells, day and night, so that, in such awful solitude, they would have nothing to do but ponder their acts, repent and reform. By 1825, New York had begun an entire penal system that combined individual cells and total silence with floggings, hard labor in fields and quarries, undeviating routine, and subsistence level food and shelter. As the first warden of Sing Sing had said, "Reformation...