Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., and the editors of the Richmond newspapers had spent the previous four years wandering among the ruins and voicing the shibboleths of 100 years earlier, but at last had raised the white flag of recognition that whatever victory which Virginia had one was pyrrhic in nature, a victory with casualties so heavy that it was no longer tolerable to fight on the same ground. It finds it to have been the harvest of an earnest, but tragically misguided, scheme to turn away Federal courts and the orders they had issued, a harvest "of blind, unyielding adherence to a ragged standard against which time, circumstance, legality and, we suspect, the consciences of many troubled Virginians were working."

It suggests that North Carolina could ill afford to smile in complacent self-satisfaction at that "surrender", despite the fact that North Carolina had been borne out in its approach, practicing gradual desegregation without defying the law, preferable to the solution in Virginia of closing the public schools. North Carolina had seen the wisdom of its State Supreme Court Court, declaring that Federal law had to be upheld along with pupil assignment and local option by school boards.

That Virginia might now contemplate turning to the course on which North Carolina had traveled for some time made strange and bitter balderdash of the words with which, just the previous week, former Governor Guy Tuck of Virginia had criticized North Carolina and its public officials, speaking of the latter and of Tennessee as having "succumbed to senseless edicts". He had continued: "Those states have not been blessed with the type of leadership to wage a fight in opposition to these federal encroachments, such as we have here in Virginia in the persons of [Senator] Harry Byrd and Governor Almond."

It suggests that North Carolinians would regard it as a dubious blessing as it became uncomfortably plain that the leaders in Virginia had ignored the best interests of their state and were now eating their bold words by which they had defied Federal law and squandered Virginia's public education in the process. It questions whether North Carolina, which had left the crucial choice between desegregation and school-closing to the localities, or Virginia, which had forced a statewide scheme on the localities, had "succumbed to senseless edicts".

It finds that Virginia rightly cherished its fine past, the ideals of its fertile tradition and great dynasties, but also finds it perhaps time for it to admit that it was looking to the past once too often and that its energy would be better expended in the battles of 1958 than of 1858, to cease mistaking arrogance for pride. It suggests that Virginia had labored under the South's common illusion, that in the complexities of an industrialized society, where rapid migration was changing every old balance, all it took to keep things the same was human muscle and rhetoric. Things would not remain the same and the many impersonal forces of a turbulent economy and social order could not be battered back, nor did one have to be an economic or other type of determinist to admit it.

No one liked to acknowledge impersonality or inevitability, least of all people for whom conservative agrarian stability had been a way of life from the beginning. Yet to scoff at and ignore the impersonal forces at work in the South's changing racial order, to seek a personal and helpless scapegoat to pillory, was to invite chaos. For unless the South, with responsibility and purposefulness mastered those forces for good, they would be riding the region bareback for generations.

You Magaville, USA, residents need to understand those basic truths, that there is no turning back the clock to the Nineteenth Century or the early Twentieth Century. The horse is long out of the barn, replaced by the mechanized age, and either it has to be dealt with on a realistic plane, restraining its worst tendencies to steamroll humanity out of existence, as was recognized so painfully out of the experience of worldwide depression wrought from the 1920's excesses, leading to the 1930's and the wartime era which followed, or planning indeed for the future will have to be only short-term, in terms of decades for human sustenance, not centuries. Climate change, foremost among the exigencies with which humankind must now deal, far more important to the future of mankind than transitory conflicts which will always be present among groups of individuals vying for limited resources, can neither be denied nor ascribed to some "natural forces" which are only cyclical, ignoring the while the impact of the industrial revolution of the previous 175 years.

That which has already been damaged will not naturally replenish without that realization and considerable reduction of those man-made forces which are destroying the environment in which we live on the earth. Science fiction and its technological fixes and happy-endings will not provide much comfort when the planet is so irremediably destroyed that increasingly erratic and destructive weather systems, evident already for more than the last 75 years, make human habitability of the environment a thing of the past. There will be no retreat to some distant planet or universe where all will be swell.

Grow up and realize that the Trump fantasy policies of trying to reverse time are rooted in the same fantasies that were his crazy ideas about a "stolen election" in 2020, in the same "alternative facts" that his giant Mall crowd size was at the 2017 inauguration, that were his insane delusions of raping, pillaging and plundering hordes of illegal immigrants flooding daily over the border at will, allowed by Democrats for some reason bent on destroying the country, which only he, the caped crusader, can now save, all being in the Never-never Land of Peter Pan, where under the pillow will be in the morning always a new, shiny Trump dollar in exchange for the tooth you had to have pulled for want of affordable dental care.

Walter Lippmann, in the concluding piece of his four-part series on his visit recently to Moscow, provides the second installment regarding his overall conclusions, having begun them on Saturday. He indicates that the old industrial countries of Western Europe and North America did not provide an example which the great, crowded, submerged masses could imitate, as could India, which he regards as the best example of a large country with a depressed population which could be significantly bolstered economically with American aid to appear to the neutral and fence-sitting nations as an example of capitalism at work to raise the standard of living of an impoverished large population to neutralize or defeat the Soviet propaganda regarding the Russian advance in 40 years since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and in nine years since the Communist Chinese revolution of 1949.