But, in looking back, I also realize that there was something different about my activism that could only take its personal toll. It internalized the issues, both at the institutional and the personal levels. In those public presentations, and perhaps more importantly in innumerable group and personal discussions, I was trying to understand how to make America's Perestroika an integrated part of my existence. This demanded a personal commitment, again within my own institution and my own professional conduct. It also demanded the generation of stress in relations with people who meant the most to me, with faculty and staff colleagues, with students and with some in my church where I also had to face how effectively I could communicate what I was learning to those outside my profession and institution.

Engineering is such a wonderful professional base from which to counter a degenerate tide in human affairs. Just because it is so thoroughly in bed with industry, the profession has the potential for independence from misguided government policies. This realization flooded over me in the midst of a talk I was giving to an audience of mathematicians who had met at the University of California, Berkeley, to consider the pros and cons of accepting SDI support. The reward for cultivating a synthesis of the mathematics with civilian needs would be some control over the societal impact, I said. Once again, given as it was in the middle of the night Boston time, the blank expressions on the majority of faces left me with a feeling of not having been well enough prepared for this audience of thinking people who saw industry as a distraction from their basic frontiers.

Taken in specific terms, my own experience as an engineer is only generally applicable to the context of others. To really integrate breadwinning with societal and even spiritual aspirations, whether that be for professionals such as scientists and lawyers or people doing any job with their minds or hands in any combination, is the true test of an education. Just the notion that we can achieve this integration by exposing students of engineering and science to subjects in philosophy and even ethics is in a way contradictory. An inspiration for me has been the sensitivity of Carolyn Whitbeck at MIT to the need for making these subjects an integrated part of the professional’s way of thinking, best learned "hands on". It saddens me to know people who are paragons in their professions, who can knowingly refer to the arts in several languages, who are abreast of current events, who are even religiously active and yet who pursue their breadwinning without this integration.

What do you say to those wanting America's Perestroika when you can no longer try to say it by example? Especially, what do you say to your children and students?

In 1940, my uncles were of the same age as my current students. The world they contemplated had some aspects in common with the one we face in 1990. Hitler had already ravaged Europe, as had Tojo the Asian mainland, and yet America was reluctant to be drawn into the war. It took Pearl Harbor to galvanize the public. Fortunately, we responded before our own military capacity was much impaired. But, just as the threat was monolithic, so could be the mechanism of galvanizing consensus.

With each day, we are seeing the erosion of our own capacity to respond to this present threat. This time the threat seems overwhelming because it is so insidious. Like cancer, its attack is so devastating because it takes so many forms, each adapted to a particular weakness. The Persian Gulf confrontation is doubly tragic because it perpetuates the notion that the real threat can be dealt with in military terms. A military that responds to the needs of a society with its parts in balance is a noble institution. But, as an organism that reaches into all parts of the societal body, like cancer taking on a malignant life of its own which is beyond our means to sustain, it becomes the enemy.

In 1940, my uncles faced at best an insecure future, even death. Their future could have been that of Joe Kennedy or John Kennedy, one paying the ultimate sacrifice and the other finding the experience of WWII a springboard to what must have been a rewarding life. At the same time, I feel anguish and envy for my uncles, envy because their experience would be celebrated in entertainment and the real life of America for the next four decades. In contemplating the lives of those who choose to fight for America's Perestroika, I have the same mixture of feelings. It is with sadness that I see our having come to such a weakened state, especially since it could have been avoided. It is with envy that I see the battle for America's Perestroika as the most important in our nation's history.