Sy Safransky
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 1987The Universe Is Made Of Stories
An Interview With Eaglefeather
One of my hopes is that by telling stories from different cultures, I’m weaving closed some tears in the social fabric of a society that values the white, Christian, male perspective, and shuns and suppresses other ways of seeing. By telling stories from different parts of the world to children all over the world, I hope I’m uniting people by expanding their awareness of each other.
August 1987Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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