THE FEAR CAMPAIGN

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nation's mood, that the commission's long-range proposals for social and economic programs at the federal level will soon be enacted on anything near the scale recommended. The report has provoked intense interest and prompted reforms in some areas; in many, it has been largely ignored. Mayor John Reading of Oakland, Calif., even accuses the Kerner commission of being partly responsible for the militants' takeover of Oakland's black leadership. "Permissiveness will do us in," says Reading, "and the Kerner answer was permissiveness." To this, New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was vice chairman of the Kerner commission, replies that if repression becomes society's reaction to disorder, "we might then have to choose between the random terror of the criminal and the official terror of the state.

We might have to concede, openly and candidly, that The Great Experiment in self-government died, the victim of violence, before its 200th birthday."

In the hope that the U.S. will hold a birthday party instead of a wake in the '70s, the Kerner commission offers some cogent proposals. The nation's welfare system must be reformed and upgraded to provide basic sustenance where needed and to discourage the breakup of families. The commission urges creation of 2,000,000 jobs within three years, with remedial training where necessary. That may be an impossible goal, but it would get at the largest single source of criminal raw material—the out-of-school, out-of-work kids. Prekindergarten, primary and secondary education in the slums is another vast target, but it is universally acknowledged that public education does not do much for ghetto children. One commission proposal that deserves serious consideration is a twelve-month school year for the culturally undernourished.

Challenge King George

It is largely true, as politicians never tire of remarking, that respect for law and authority—whether in the form of the cop or the university or the President—has diminished markedly in the last generation. However, a society that expects to keep challenge within reasonable bounds must retain a sense of perspective. Demands that the letter of every law be enforced to the full are risible. Myriad statutes range from Internal Revenue Service rulings to Coast Guard safety regulations for pleasure boats, and hundreds of such laws are widely flouted by the most respectable citizens. It is seldom that a responsible businessman engages in fraud or embezzlement, but when he does it is apparent to the poor that his transgression, however grandiose, rarely draws a penalty comparable in economic terms to that meted out to the petty thief. To which the responsible businessman is apt to reply that he spends a great deal of time and effort satisfying government laws and regulations, while the common criminal goes lightly punished —or so it sometimes seems to the embittered affluent citizen.

No one can argue that income tax evasion—or winking at gambling, prostitution or even pot—is comparable to major, violent crime. Yet such common transgressions symbolize an important fact: some laws are simply petty, unrealistic, unenforceable or unjust. The discrepancies affect the most trivial as well as the most important matters. If no one had had the courage to challenge state and local segregation