I have never forgotten Augusta Koen Boatright, my high school American history teacher at Northside High School in Fort Smith. I remember her foremost as someone who had the courage in 1965 to speak with uncompromising directess to our American class about the active involvement she and her husband had in the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (whose May 18, 1967 Denver University speech I later had the fortune to attend) and precisely why she felt this involvement was not only important but absolutely necessary … and I can still feel the stunned silence of the class and hear her words as she spoke. What it all came down to was this: IF we don't consider this cause as "our cause" – and not just the cause of all the people still living in their segregated part of town on the north side of Fort Smith, Arkansas – still attending in 1965 their own schools, etc. – this will amount to a complete betrayal of all we only IMAGINE that we stand for as a nation. Mrs. Boatright, then, possessed a remarkable gift for shocking an entire class of 17-year-olds into complete silence by just standing up and stating what should be obvious to anyone who thinks. I will also never forget a "cultural" film Mrs. Boatright showed to our class featuring a prominent European string quartet performing in live concert a string quartet from Brahms … and which stands out in my memory as the only instance of anything like it during my entire time in high school. A Brahms string quartet, naturally, has nothing to do with American history – but this, I think, was the intended message: there exist completely "useless" things in this world (even though we may have no relation to them) which remain, in their own way, as "priceless" as the American concepts of "freedom and justice." As it turned out, the whole class was stunned throughout this film as well – as though it was the first time in their lives most of them had ever heard a string quartet … which was very likely the case and entirely justified including the film in an American history class. Nothing I've discovered since I sat in Mrs. Boatright's class can contradict what Karl the Austrian writer Kraus wrote approximately a century ago: "The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on."