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CONCLUSION The story of Fitzgerald is not merely a story of war, for Fitzgerald has also fought against war. Nor is it merely a story of racism and unemployment , for the community has fought for equality, led by the Community Council. Nor is it a story of the invasion of the slums, for the community has fought to keep its streets, its stores and houses liveable, and has fought for more and better schools and recreation areas, for tots and teenagers. The story of Fitzgerald is still more comprehensive : it is the story of America itself — how we got this way, our Americanization, our rough and breath-taking climb and our equally breathtaking pause before either another upward spiral or the most spectacular crash since the demise of the dinosaur. The fate of Fitzgerald and America is now hanging in a battle for human survival itself; man faces death by his own machines. The Natural Landscape Again The beginning of this book pictured the natural landscape between the last of the glaciers and the first of the white men. What happened in between? Science, like art, is simple, innocent, so let us ask an innocent question. What sounds would you have heard sitting outside a hundred years ago in Fitzgerald? Mary Basancon remembers the sounds of her farm childhood: There would be the night noises, the whippoorwills in the evening, and the owls would be hooting , the night birds would squawk every once in a while. Wecould hear the train whistles from the Grand Trunk just on the other side of Grand River, In the evening especially, the train made a sad, weird sound. And do you know that on a certain kind of day you could hear the boat whistle (from the Detroit River) at our place? The farmers would hear barnyard noises — cows, chickens — and peculiar machinery sounds, such as the rattley clatter of the binder in the oats. 239 Typically we categorize sounds, filter them into different components such as "natural," "human ," "machine made," but in the innocence of science we might be asked to listen to them all together as an ecology, as a whole. Do the various sounds interact, are they related to each other? Listening to the sounds today in the backyard on a late summer's evening, a surprising number of birds twitter. Undoubtedly the greatest total number of sounds, day in and day out, are the sounds of the remaining birds. The trees still rustle their leaves as they convert the carbon monoxide into oxygen and the cars and and airplanes, both propeller and jet, roar almost all the time converting oxygen into carbon monoxide and more poisonous things. The children yelp, as the Indian children did, and the sound is no different in English (white or black) than in Ojibwa. The dogs yelp, as before,and the children still imitate the animal sounds, asthe Indian children did. At even a slight distance away, the mammalian animal quality of the children yelping comes through. Theexpressway rumbles like a surf, always. It is unnoticed except when it is stopped, as it was during the Rebellion of 1967. In that peculiar time everyone noticed how quiet it was,just sirens, gun shots and military helicopters, usually far away. The new sounds, the sounds that the white man added, are the sounds of the machines. It is clear from the sound of the cars going down the street through the playing children, that the machines often make war on the children. When a brake is screeched on, all the human animals pause and go tense. Will the long screeching of the machine de-accelerating end in a great crunching, glass-shattering thump? Will it end in another child being hit on the streets? Men must stop toying with atomic poisons. The winds are a delivery system,and there is no such thing as an anti-wind wind. Mankind is in a biological crisis precipitated by a social one. The explosive force in one hydrogen bomb alone, either aimed at Detroit from outer space or placed in Detroit to "protect it," would turn this city and Fitzgerald with it into a new Great Lake, Lake Detroit, five hundred feet deep and five miles across. But the human race is tough, energetic and cagey. Perhaps it will sense its common humanity before it dooms itself. If this book has left the reader angry, good; or hopeful, good; or embarrassed,good; or determined , good; or intellectually aroused, good...

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