European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - May 12, 1977, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 16 the stars and stripes thursday May 12, 1977 15 mention watergate William f. Buckley what social posture in such diplomacy although like most people my age have been around i have not arrived at a position concerning the proper let alone the desirable social posture Between diplomats negotiating on behalf of their coun tries when one such country is a free country and the other totalitarian. The problem is of course More acute when the countries in question have engaged in bitter War. And yet More acute when the free country has been Defeated. Churchill famous epigraph was in War Resolution. In defeat Defiance. In Victory magnanimity. In peace Good today s headline . And Hanoi open Frank George new Era Here for hand capped handicapped persons Are acquainted with disappointment and they have experienced much of it since 1973. When Congress grandly declared that no other Wise qualified handicapped individual shall solely by reason of his Handicap suffer discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. In this heavily subsidized society that can have a Broad reach. But such Broad sweeps of sentiment Are Laws Only in a hollow technical sense. They require the executive Branch to make regulations that make the Law. The department of health. Education and welfare which is not reluctant to write regulations wrestled with the task of giving substance to Congress sentiments. Recently after More than three years i produced 48 dense pages of rules plus 106 pages of related feigned precision. Hew guesses that the new requirements will Cost society especially school systems $2.4 billion. Actually no one even knows How Man millions of people probably More than 40 million Are handicapped in the sense of having a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or More major life but the significance of the regulations is that now the nation must Stop rationing citizenship almost a allocating to the Handi capped Only As much As is convenient. The regulations require an elimination of physical barriers to the handicapped wherever Federal funding is involved. An they stipulate that handicapped children regardless of the nature or severity of the Handicap Are entitled to free Public Educa Tion appropriate to their education has been the distinctive american right. The Extension of it especially to the mentally handicapped will generate legitimate , for example the agonizing judg ments required by the Rule that the Handi capped must be educated with the non handicapped in regular classrooms to the maximum extent the new rules require an endless exer Cise of sensitive discretion by Public officials especially at the local level. In this regard they demonstrate the difficulty of much of what Modem government be fully effective the new hew regu lations really require a degree of social sensitivity which if it existed would make the regulations unnecessary. They Are a attempt by the Central government to improve society s treatment of the Handi capped in face to face situations and to manage this improvement by codifying standards of behaviour that Are better than prevailing government has extended the citizen s claims of entitlement and no the handicapped Are moving toward full citizenship. This has been a Long time incoming because the handicapped Are a varied and often invisible minority invisible in part because of discrimination this discrimination often involves a natural human failure of imaginative sympathy a failure by the majority to imagine How life looks to persons less fortunate. I collect comical examples of such fail ure. In the 1920s a Beacon Hill dowager told that Many Boston Homes lacked indoor plumbing exclaimed you would think the people who live in them would have found out before moving in in the 1930s an industrialist declared that it did t Payto run radio advertising on sunday be cause everybody is playing Rockefeller told an audience that the tax Burden Falls on the average person like you and Charles Reich a Yale professor trendy in the 1960s he wrote the greening of americas id he had attended preschool and an Ivy league College and Law school like everyone but failure of imaginative sympathy by government is common and not comi Cal. A society deficient in imaginative sym Pathy surrounds the crippled with thoughtlessly designed facilities which provide no convenient Access for wheel chairs facilities that shout society s indifference. A society deficient in imaginative sympathy consigns the retarded to education programs that rein Force rather than ameliorate the Crue capriciousness of nature and express through exclusions from Basic rights the barbarous thought that weakness is Akin to crime in the kingdom of the Strong. The new regulations announce the begin Ning of a costly but Welcome Era. Nothing the Carter administration will do in the next three years will touch so Many lives to Washington Pom Well men mow do we Cap this one talks aimed at normalizing ties. 3j4hour session in Paris is called Friendly and useful let us suppose that Hitler had Defeated great Britain which by All accounts he very nearly did. And let us suppose that Churchill s counsel to Defiance proved a unrealistic As the counsel to Defiance in Poland or elsewhere in Eastern Europe proved to be. And suppose then that our representative met in Geneva the representative of the third Reich. Would we expect to read that the meeting of the two diplomats had been Friendly and useful i ask the question for once not knowing exactly what is the proper answer. Is impossible to have diplomatic ties with coun tries in which the relations Between Diplo Mats Are less than that in act it was so for about a dozen years with the soviet Union after the breakdown of the partner ship in the world War. How was it expressed through a studied formality Eisenhower declining to smile publicly in the presence of Khrushchev in 19s9. Through a refusal to participate in each others National feast Days we did t attend their october party they did t attend our fourth of july. When Richard Nixon went to China in1972 it was not known exactly How he would act though the scheduled banquets presaged a certain degree of conviviality. Nixon turned the occasion into an ecumenical honeymoon. One recalls the caption under the cartoon of prime minister Eden visiting with president Eisenhower in 1955 and sitting dressed in old country clothes on a Park Bench outside the White House Eden As the old lady. Darling what Darling nothing Darling. Just Darling in peking Richard Nixon Man aged to compare Mao s revolution with George Washington a and promised that we would engage in a Long Anarch Ogeth that was the equivalent of promising in Moscow that we would share an octo Ber revolution , in Paris the Vietnam representative meets the United states a Power it Defeated. Just As there is no Defiance on the part of the United states there is no marked magnanimity on the part of North Vietnam whose representative handan said that the . Contribution to Healing the wounds of War is an undeniable obligation in terms of the legality of the parts agreement on Vietnam International Law morality and human conscience. The . Conducted a War of genocide i Vietnam with very serious consequences or the life of the vietnamese people Bot now and in the Hitler of course might have uttered exactly the same words although against Hitler we used More weapons than we did against the North Viet namese. Would we in Geneva in 1945. Have swallowed such a description of a War to save Europe from Hitler in the Friendly manner characterized by the dispatch later in the Day Henry Kissinger lec Turing in Washington termed absurd the suggestion that the vietnamese Hadany right to economic help. He is of course Correct the vietnamese having exuberantly violated the painfully wrought treaty of is difficult to answer the question How to maintain one s dignity in the Circum stances. One s dignity is not merely a self serving concern. It is an affirmation of ideals that survive or ought to survive defeat on the Battlefield. The unite states having fought to give South Viet Nam an Opportunity to be free and Independent roust not Deal now insouciant by with the matter must not proceed As though it did t really Ever matter. O the opinions expressed in he column 4nd cartoons ont i pm Ftp men am a the Lumen and to in no to. Be considered a representing the vows of the Surl and so net or me United states government
