Hitting Close to Home

HOME and family are the focus of Middle American morality. Thus the women of Middle America are often more disturbed than their husbands by the assaults on that morality. They usually reduce large issues to the immediate scale of their lives: inflation is a steak not served, law and order a five-year-old son who must walk six uncertain blocks to school. Their voices are not so much shrill as perplexed.

Mrs. Mildred Budion, 39, the wife of a New York City patrolman, worries about her changing neighborhood in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn. The Budions send their five children to Catholic schools: With the public school system today, they don't get the discipline. If the nuns feel like belting them, they could. And then there's "the mixture" in public schools. I lived on this block practically all my life, and there were very few changes. But more and more it's changing now. More and more superintendents are black, and that's how it all starts. I'm not against all blacks. If they're halfway decent, who minds them? I lived on 18th Street with a colored family. They were nice. If you get the right people, okay. But not the families that come here. These are from down South. Most of them are on welfare and have no sense of values. With the Negro people coming, I feel we'll have to get out. It won't be a safe city.

Mrs. Dorothy King, 47, a mother of three and wife of an Atlanta manufacturer's representative, reads a book a week--a somewhat un-Middle American habit in a television age--but finds fewer and fewer books to her taste: I read one book about a brother and sister living together. "This is sick," I told myself. I can accept these things as facts of life, but I don't have to read about them. Sex is so cheap and available now, it seems to have lost something. When I was married, I felt my husband and I shared something very special, something I'd never shared with anyone else. Girls don't have that attitude any more. We looked up to actresses like Irene Dunne and Loretta Young, not women walking down the aisle on the verge of delivery.

Mrs. Mary Cobb Bugg, 37, an Atlanta mother of two and part-time antique dealer, is dismayed by the drug culture: This generation is getting as hung up on drugs as ours did on liquor. My mother used to scream at me not to use liquor, and I'll be doing the same with my children about drugs. There is no immorality in either one; the dangers are practical. People can get on these drug trips and not come back. I'm just scared to death of drugs, including marijuana, which might lead to addiction to harder things. Anyway, I just don't think we need the kind of buffer that drugs afford us. Life is not all that bad that we need something to break the reality of it.

Mrs. Madeleine Winter, 47, a newspaper librarian in Pittsfield, Mass., is angered by student unrest: Dissent is disgusting. If you have a complaint, write your Congressman or the President. School is to get an education. Nobody asked the student dissenters to go to college, so what right do they have to dissent? Every time I see protesters, I say, "Look at those creeps." But then my 12-year-old son says, "They're not creeps. They have a perfect right to do what they want."

Mrs. Mary Hargrove, 46, lives in Silver Spring, Md., and works as a florist's assistant in downtown Washington:

I won't come downtown after dark and neither will my friends. The city is deserted after dark. Everybody is afraid to walk on the streets. I think the Supreme Court is ruining the country with its decisions. Criminals are being released on technicalities. My husband is an oil-burner mechanic, and he used to be on call 24 hours a day. No more. He doesn't work after dark.

Mrs. Barbara Baisley, 34, the wife of a Glencoe, Ill., lawyer, worries about the America in which her four children are growing up: I want my children to live and grow up in an America as I knew it, where we were proud to be citizens of this country. I'm damned sick and tired of listening to all this nonsense about how awful America is. If you feel that way, why stay here? We were brought up to think that anything that is worthwhile in life is worth working for and sacrificing for. It's never going to be one big beautiful world, like some of the flower children seem to be demanding. Life isn't like that.

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