A gentleman's agreement

"Driving away from the inn I knew about every man or woman who'd been told the job was filled when it wasn't, every youngster who'd been turned down by a college or a summer camp. I knew the rage that pitches through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed. From that moment, I saw an unending attack by adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve, on adolescents trying to get a job or an education or into medical school. And I knew that they had somehow known it, too. They, those patient stubborn men who argued and wrote and fought and came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They knew the tree is known by its fruit and that injustice corrupts a tree; that its fruit withers and shrivels and falls at last to that dark ground of History where other great hopes have rotted and died; where equality and freedom remain still the only choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or a nation."