Apparently, most students today don't enjoy any such experience, and they are ready to dismantle the Establishment before they have either defined it or tasted it. In a democracy, dissent is as essential as the air we breathes. It's only when students form an elite society, immune from ordinary restraints, that I worry about dissent. He was asked what counsel he would give to those who dissent against the draft. Most of them seem better informed than I am, and they have their own special problems.
Every country is entitled to a few mistakes.
The Vietnam war is a mistake. The Selective Service is inequitable. Yet even a country that is in the midst of a mistake must have an armed force loyal to its basic beliefs and prepared to defend its general principles. If that were to go, all would go. Yet most of the ills of New York are attributable to a too great concentration in too small a space.