S.I. Hayakawa jumped on a car and pulled the plug on speakers. Would any REPUBLICAN do that?
If once a riot were to be responded to by a hundred citizens with rifles the destruction would stop, at least in the part of the country that got that response and if there were to be a dozen dead rioters, arrests and trials would be problematic and probably lead to not much. It took four dead in O Hi O and that series of riots and occupations and the violence that accompanied, to be suddenly over and it all got quiet.
Hayakawa had no trouble rejecting the cant and cowardice all around him. Asked whether, being of Japanese extraction, he didn’t side with minorities, he said he certainly did, but the radical activists did not speak for the majority of blacks or anyone else. They were media creations, he said, adding that TV news suffers from an excess of “show-business values.”
Solzhenitsyn - A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.