Public Addresses 87
may suffer or avoid. But unless the basic experience of the
wisest of our kind is to go for naught (and all else worth
having go with it, too), then there are some bed-rock truths
which will still be fruitful even in an age that outmodes our
present models of knowledge and technology.
One of these truths is that although a crisis is a moment
of decision, the options which actually are open to us in the
crisis itself are largely put there by what we have done or
left undone in the preceding Time Being. The Russians
blast off a Sputnik, a government calls out the troops at Little
Rock, the Caracas mob breaks loose, France falls into convul-
sion—and the crisis bursts about our ears. Now, what is pos-
sible? Only what has been made possible by what was done
in the Time Being before the crisis. We Americans have often
had the good fortune to be able to mobilize our resources for
a crisis after it had come upon us. Increasingly now, we are
being denied the luxury of any such time lag. There is, for
example, a hurry-up call for more and better scientists and
engineers—as if we could make up for the deficiencies of the
past two decades in a single college generation.
It is almost a definition of “crisis” to say that it is a time
when what a man has been doing is put to the test, with no
chance to get more ready. If this is so, then what we do to
redeem the Time Being from insignificance will go far to re-
deem the future crises from disaster.
For a second basic truth, we know that spasmodic efforts
—such as a college education!—are partially wasted unless
they are followed up, in continued learning and in constantly
transvalued experience. The biblical virtue of patience is not
at all equivalent to passivity or dull endurance. It means per-
sistence in well-doing—even when the flail of urgency is off
your back. In every sequence of events there is a plastic