GREEK ORTHODOX YOUTH OF AMERICA 933

artificial and masochistic sophistication — the vague uneasiness that
our values are false — that there is something wrong with being
patriotic, honest, moral or hardworking.

This phenomenon could be described as collective breast beating
where a nation indulges itself in self-flagellation on everything from
Vietnam to violence. Abroad, we are so busy apologizing to our
critics for our prosperity and our position of power-, that we have
failed to employ either for the good of the world.

At home, we are equally immobilized by this new national pastime
of intellectual immolation. The report of the U. S. Commission on
Civil Disorders, appointed after the violent summer of 1967, pro-
vides a classic example. The Commission headed by my good friend
Otto Kerner, the former Governor of Illinois, after months of ex-
haustive research on recent civil disturbances, issued a report to the
President. Its central thesis was a searing indictment of the American
Mainstream.

Careful study of the Kerner report's documentation refutes its
contention that white racism is the real cause of violence. In examin-
ing the attitudes of rioters, the report concluded that the typical
rioter is, and I quote, "almost equally hostile toward middle-class
Negroes... his hostility is more apt to be a product of social and
economic class than of race. "

The profile of the rioter as drawn by the Kerner Commission
depicts a Negro male between the ages of 15 and 24, a school drop-
out and lifelong resident of the community. If employed, "his em-
ployment was frequently interrupted by periods of unemployment. "
"He feels strongly that he deserves a better job and that he is barred
from achieving it, not because of lack of training, ability or ambition,
but because of discrimination by employers. "

Removing racial identification, this could be the portrait of a
classical troublemaker, the malcontent who abuses society for his own
failure. If this is the typical rioter, I cannot believe he is any more
representative of the black majority than the Ku Klux Klansman is
symbolic of white America.

When one dispassionately regards this profile of the rioter one can-
not help but agree with the Kerner Commission critic who said:
"They seem to blame everybody but the people who did it. " This
masochistic group guilt for white racism which pervades the Kerner
report, and to a large extent preoccupies the mind of our nation,
excuses individual responsibility altogether.