WHEN THE DOVE TURNS HAWK
WHEN the dove turns hawk in search of peace, its credibility is bound to be sus pect. Some of last Sunday's protesters in London recalled the Vienna Youth Congress of a decade ago, where a goon squad trampled a Scotsman nearly to death with cries of "Peace and Justice." Did the London hooligans give a tinker's cuss for the agonised peoples of Vietnam? Were they basically no different from the mobsters at Old Trafford—save that the latter had the honesty not to pretend to be fighting for causes? Were they like the Easterhouse gangs, fighting because there was nowt' else to do? Or like the roving bands of unemployed youth in the towns of developing nations, willing to go for the ride with the first subversive campaigner? The time has come to stop equating all protest with principle. The plea that the young are morally outraged is also wearing thin. There are two kinds of moral wrath. One is expressed in public exhibitions of anger, direc ted at things you cannot be blamed for, and which make few demands of you. Vietnam is a long way away.
The other sort of moral wrath leaves you
1 working your passage to Vietnam or Biafra, with no time for protest. You are too busy where you will labour in shanty towns or transit camps, caring perhaps for lepers or cholera 1 victims. y, You might even be engaged in rectifying 5 evils on your doorstep. There are a million $ underprivileged people in Britain. The Order 1 of Builders used thousands of youngsters $ working in their vacations to build homes for f persons displaced by World War II. Mr. Alec 1 Dickson's Community Service Volunteers recruit teenagers to work their summer holly days in Cheshire Homes, approved schools or i wards for incontinent mental patients. 0 Frankie Vaughan's intervention in Glasgow Iwas no empty gesture. He followed it up by 1 giving the lads a job to do. Like the Abbe 0 Michonneau, he knows that youth's heroic 5 instincts can lead them either way : to mindless 0 0 protest or to self-surrender. All they need to protest led the right way is an invitation—to some thing that may seem to be somewhat beyond their strength. It is a failure of leadership for which we elders stand indicted.