William Raspberry's syndicated columns give the voice of sanity to addressing some of the most controversial problems in America. Few Americans have tepid feelings about the multitude of subjects he assesses in his column in the Washington Post-- among them, education, poverty, drugs, racism, parenting. Because they are among our greatest concerns and because we are so deeply involved with them, we too often lack accurate perspective.

But in thirty-five or forty years perhaps we will have put many of these issues into sharper focus and will wonder why they raged during our times...