Sy Safransky
Sy Safransky is founder and editor emeritus of The Sun. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
On The Poverty Of Affluence
An Interview With Paul Wachtel
When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.
February 1988Last Words
I stood by the open door, watching my old Olympia sail past me. It hit the grassy strip near the parking lot, the carriage extended like a climber’s broken leg after a fall. . . . I remember the thud; the carriage bell ringing once, with the impact; then ringing again, as if in disbelief.
September 1987
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