I have watched with dismay as race relations in the United States have grown worse and worse. It seems as if all the good will won during my lifetime has been squandered away. We have gone from one daring kiss between a white man and a black woman on television in 1967, to a time when interracial marriage is a matter of course, as it ought to be.
Most people will say that we need to talk things through. Perhaps they are right. I have never put much hope in talk. I don't mean that talk is cheap. It is often quite costly, as when people grow farther apart by stubbornness, by saying things they do not wholly mean, by opening wounds that were on the way to healing, or by the thinly veiled violence of emotional manipulation and threats.
