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swish or swim

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D. B. VEST

Of the two things that ONE has to do, it has done wonders with the first. For the first thing was to make the majority understand, respect and 'do right by' this large persecuted minority. But, though this first service took precedence of urgency over the second, in the end the second service may well prove the greater. For social history has shown us that if you give a down trodden people freedom from tyranny without giving them understanding of themselves they cannot benefit by their freedom. They often lose it again, or worse, they, in turn, persecute (as churches, e.g. the Pilgrim Fathers) their own minorities. This is particularly true when such a people's problem has not been so much economic or political as psychosocial and psychophysical. ONE has begun this second task: self-education, self-knowledge for the homophile. Increasingly this will become its main task. ONE and all other informational and instructive centers and circulations must bend their efforts toward the homophile to understand himself.

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If he is to do so he must have an accurate impression of himself and what nature is doing with his sort and with all mankind.

One of the basic blunders of preanthropological. pre-psychophysical humanitarianism was the bland assumption that everyone of any race or culture really wanted to be what we thought we were: i.e. rational, utilitarian persons who spent all our time making money, making machines to make more money, who dressed drearily, built uglily, shunned amusement and worked ourselves to death in order to "leave a fortune." We put those who fell into our money-power into our dismal clothes and, so liveried, sent them on our dismal vicious circle of making more money to make more money. It is amazing and terrible what fanatic self-assurance can do. whether it spring from Puritan capitalism, mechanistic communism, or "just being normal."

Native cultures, free, easy, uninhibited. amiable, beautiful, have time

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