'60s made for tricky situations. Idealistic young church worker asked by visiting black-studies prof to buy guns for "the movement." Unabomber and cop-killer. Francis Bacon on marriage.

How (some) things were, April of '96, a Blithe Spirit report . . .

Color-blind, religion-blind, politics-blind . . . It's said we can't be a color-blind society, because there are too many skeletons in our closet. But we're religion-blind, aren't we? Don't we gloss over religious differences for the sake of religious peace? Where would we be if we drove home religious differences with the same zeal with which we drive home supposed racial differences? Call it your revolutionary thought for the day.

For example . . . Senatorial candidate Al Salvi's law partner, a state rep from Wheaton, has a bill up to outlaw censorship of American history "based on religious preference." It has the ACLU and American Jewish Committee up in arms, who say it opens the doors to special religious pleading in the classroom by creationists and other true believers.

But what about the authority higher than George III mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? What about the thinking behind the Mayflower Compact? The 4/2 Sun-Times asks this. But the bashful Pilgrim John Alden is not around to speak for himself regarding the latter, and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, so what does he know?

This is a can of worms the Wheaton man is opening, but apart from the fact that religion matters a lot, like it or not, this was bound to happen. Push long enough and hard enough for cultural etc. awareness, and some are bound to say sauce for the secular goose is sauce for the religious gander. I hope I have that right. If I don't, sue me.

The Unabomber and the office painter. . . The '60s came back to roost this week in two incidents, one of them Oak Park and River Forest-related: the Unabomber suspect from Evergreen Park and the cop-killer from Philadelphia captured in River Forest and Oak Park office-painter. Both are tragedies on their face, but below surface too: the Unabomber man was a gifted kid with a great academic future, the cop-killer has for years been a solid citizen, likable and reliable. Now what are they?

The '60s took their toll, didn't they? The bomber man was in Berkeley, teaching, when he dropped out. The killer man was in the middle of black-liberation radicalism. The times were a-changing, and change kills, sometimes.

You could find it anywhere.

In Cincinnati a young church worker, idealistically helping inner-city blacks, was asked by a visiting black-studies professor to buy guns for "the movement." She didn't.

A young college teacher listened meekly while the prof talked up violent militancy to a few earnest black students, including a great running back on a fair football team.

"Is he OK?" the professor asked the students, looking over to the white teacher (me). Yes, they said, and you know something? None of us knew each other that well, nor did we have much of an idea what the hell we were doing listening to that guy from California with his black-revolutionary ideas. Maybe he didn't either, but he had less excuse than the rest of us.

What a stitch! There in a meeting room on a Jesuit campus, we were all nodding to each other as if we knew what we were talking about!

A few years later, in Oak Park, my wife and I declined to make monetary donations to a bail fund for Black Panthers -- hardly a punishable offense, to be sure. We thanked the hostess for her hospitality -- in a very nice north Oak Park home -- and slunk away in the night. We also declined on another occasion to put up draft-evaders, but that's another story.

The point is, the '60s and early '70s made for tricky situations. A web of cautionary tales, to be sure.

Rally. Really? A rally against ageism is set for May 1 at Spertus Institute on Michigan Avenue. Couldn't believe my eyes. I'm all for it. At 60-something I have only 30 or 40 years to live. A panel of distinguished speakers will raise awareness. Limited seating. Several Oak Park and River Forest agencies sponsoring it. Sigh.

It solves a problem for many white males my age: how to gain identification as part of an oppressed group.

Right? Who among us has not yearned for the notoriety, the distinctiveness, the sense of being somebody that comes from belonging to such a group? We're talking hype here, not the reality, which is no fun but has gained cachet. Thus hyped -- or mau-maued, as Tom Wolfe put it -- we wonder: Everyone else is, why not us?

A rally no less. No march?

Funny stuff in California . . . Football players Keyshawn, Kyle, and Deion got A's in a snap course at U. of S. Calif., we read in the newspapers. This helped them and others to stay in the running for dear old USC, which beat Northwestern in the Rose Bowl. They didn't even have to attend class: it was the ultimate dumbing down, in this case for wide receiver, quarterback, and tailback in that order.

Watching Notre Dame on the tube some months back, I joined in criticism of the quarterback, who had tripped or done something else foolish. I was told we should stay off the kid's back. Can't stand heat, stay out of kitchen, I muttered. The kid is on his way to being a millionaire, and I should stay off his back?

Every move he makes is a business proposition, and I'm supposed to excuse him when he trips?

Southern Cal's Keyshawn did not trip but ran beautifully and was the Rose Bowl's most valuable player. A TV announcer called him "a man among boys," the boys being Northwestern players. The announcer was very respectful of this A-student in a snap course.

Seneca again, on anger . . . The old Roman Seneca, Emperor Nero's disappointed tutor, urges talking yourself out of the anger habit. Wants us "repeatedly (to) set before ourselves its many faults," and thus head it off at the pass. "We must search out its evils and drag them into the open," the better to see anger as "damnanda" -- "to be condemned."

Good Stoic that he is, he believes in mind over matter, that as human beings we can talk ourselves into things. We just (just?) have to concentrate, work our way through things, think a lot about it, review reasons.

Garbage in, garbage out again, in this case good things in, good things out. What you concentrate on, you can become. Like Jesse Jackson's leading kids in saying, "I am somebody," though that's more autosuggestion or mantra-recital than reasoning. The Senecan practice is easily mocked and can be too glibly endorsed. Never mind that. Such objections don't get to the heart of the matter.

More Seneca on anger: controlling it . . . The best cure is to wait it out. "Dilatio" is the Latin word, related to our "dilatory." Use delaying tactics. Do nothing until you hear from sweet reason. Plato caught himself in the act of bashing a slave -- sorry, folks, that's what they did in those days -- and held the pose, looking silly. "I'm punishing an angry man," he explained when someone asked what the hell he was doing holding a stick in mid-air. Himself, that is. The slave got off, Plato having found someone else to punish -- someone whose actions he had something to say about.

This is Stoic thinking, not that Plato was a Stoic. This is Seneca's account, remember. Namely that you are responsible primarily for yourself. All your grand ideas about reforming the world? Great. But know yourself and reform yourself.

Francis Bacon on marriage and the single life, passed on as good analysis and nothing more, believe me . . . "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. . . .

"Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. . . . .

"Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects [in the royal sense], for they are light to run away. . . . .

"A single life doth well with churchmen . . . .

"Certainly wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men, though they may be many times more charitable, because their means are less [exhausted], yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hardhearted . . . because their tenderness is not so oft called upon." #