There’s a memorable scene from a motion picture, A Night at the Opera, in which the Marx Brothers take part in an antic chase backstage during a performance. Distracting and unrelated painted backdrops—scenes of Grand Canyon, Penn Station, a Venetian canal, etc.—rise and fall behind the distraught prima donna as Harpo and Chico swing Tarzan-like from prop rope to prop rope in an effort to avoid pursuing stage-hands and cops. It’s hilarious for the audience, most of whom obviously want to be distracted, but the large female singer, like Queen Victoria, is not amused as she tries to sing her song of tragedy.

America’s poor must feel like the unamused opera singer these days. For brief periods in the 1960s the country watched and listened and even reacted constructively when the poor stood center-front to tell their sad tale of deprivation and brutalization. But in the first few days of the 1970s, both the scenario as well as the scenery are being changed. The poor are realizing their brief moment in the spotlight was more like an audition than a “real” play. The producers want to stage something else.

Environment and ecology are the “now” things. We’re being told that the space-ship Earth is dirtier than Peanuts’ pal, Pig Pen. Pollution, not poverty, is the major orchestrated theme of the Nixon Administration. In his recent State of the Union message, the President evoked an image of 1980 when seven out of 10 persons lived among traffic tangles, suffocating smog, poisoned water, deafening noise and terrorizing crime. An environment cleansed of these dreadful conditions would be a welcome sight.

These problems are real, not illusionary. However, the poor—black, white, brown—have always lived among these conditions and his State of the Union message did not acknowledge this. Today, planners plot the Federally-aided freeways through low-income areas; another time, it was the elevated transit that rattled past their walk-up tenements. The steelworkers of Donora, Pennsylvania, or Gary, Indiana, haven’t breathed fresh air in their lives—nor their fathers before them. The poor have always been accustomed to trash and rubbish everywhere they walk—any municipal schedule of trash collections is designed to favor middle- and upper-income neighborhoods. Pushers, enforcers, extortionists and others of these lesser breeds without the law have always roamed the low-income neighborhoods. The truth behind the growing concern about environment is that the tax-conscious middle-class, freed from slums but not yet free to spend the season at Sun Valley or in the Caribbean, are now finding their neighborhoods full of traffic, dirt, smog, airplane noise and that the pusher is not a furtive figure downtown but instead is their neighbor’s shaggy-haired son. The New Deal was generated by middle-class economic distress and the current emphasis on an improved environment is similarly bred.

Advantages of anti-pollution national politics are many for politicians. Because all of us may, in some degree, be fairly held accountable for contributing to a polluted environment, then no one may be held responsible. By discussing the problem in global terms, as do planners with their Year 2000 land-use plans, one becomes drawn to abstractions and inattentive to specific steps to alleviate conditions. This produces scads of rich exhortatory prose and little action. For a Republican Administration, whether county, state or national, this has understandable appeal, susceptible as Republicans are to a rhetoric of fiscal parsimony. For faint-hearted suburban liberals, secretly tired of the bruising civil rights, fair-housing and anti-poverty battles, it is welcome balm. For managerial liberals (Democratic), protected in their high Civil Service perches, it provides a renewed opportunity to rework their treasured blueprints. Democratic presidential Senators see this as a way of securing their party’s 1972 nomination “on the cheap.” And, over-all, the issue is a unifying one. Clean air and clean water and clean streets. Mr. and Mrs. Clean—smoking their Winstons and Salems. In this coalition of the Clean, there can be comfortably accommodated the League of Lady Voter and the Civic Leaguer, the Junior Leaguer and the Senior Citizen, the Garden Clubber and the Gun Clubber, the ADA-er and the AMA-er, all bound into a comfy togetherness. Let the hungry eat clean air and clean water and let the children learn on clean streets.

Why be peevish or perverse about it—isn’t cleanliness next to Godliness?

Unfortunately, man’s uncollegiate relationship to man cannot be scrubbed away. (Even on a clean day, there remains Vietnam).

Recently, something called the EnVironmental Teach-in has designed April 22 as “Earth Day.” Students of colleges and universities are urged to stage a “teach-in” that day on the dangers of pollution to life and limb. Of course, the national teach-in is unexceptionable, as long as it does not detract from more important problems. It may, unfortunately, do just that. A national teach-in can only generate a prayerful sig h from the hand-wringers and viewers-with-alarm in the front offices of government and education.

A suggested agenda for a national teach-in should include not only matters of jet aircraft and DDT and smoking buses but larger issues that address themselves to “pollution” of a different sort.

1. Discuss the central question of our time—polluted human relationships—the fragile status of the Negro in America.
2. Discuss the central question of our polluted foreign policy that is preventing peace in Vietnam.
3. Discuss national genocide. The nation is literally murdering its talented men; not without reason does a wall poster sold in Washington stores carry the admonition: “America is not healthy for Kings, Kennedys, children and other worthwhile living things.”
4. Discuss with representatives of Brookings Institution, the NAM and the AFL-CIO our polluted economy with emphasis on a general question: “Does insistence on economic growth extract its price in the deterioration of our environment?”
5. Discuss an observation of Suzanne LaFollette, a prominent reformer for women’s rights in the 1920s, that the United States is engaged in a vast experiment “to prove that human beings can live a generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the reflective intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and in a proper use of the word without emotions, so long as they see the prospect of a moderate well-being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under the spell of a great number of mechanical devices for the enhancement of comfort, convenience and pleasure.”

Such an agenda might dim the approving attitude of General Hershey and Attorney General Mitchell toward the forthcoming national teach-in. 

Social change is, by its nature, not a “popular” issue, but an unpopular issue led by unpopular men and women. A nation in the throes of progressive change gathers itself and lurches to the next lamp post and there rests, perhaps for decades. Before the current impulse for change becomes indiscernible, it is hoped that the human spirit be cleansed—after that, the air and water. 

Paraphrasing Tom Paine, America mourns the plumage but forgets the dying bird.