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Fifteen months ago when I met with you for the annual meeting of the California Council I made a very few comments about certain unfortunate things at Sonoma State Hospital. The speech is taped. You can listen to it. I made no gross accusations or judgements -sic-. Yet the reaction I got was "That is no way to talk about our institution and the Nelson Building. Why did you have to do so at our dinner?" Well, Tom Nelson is a good friend of mine, but I cannot help that he allowed his name to go on a building which represents not only an outdated program idea, but, in addition, is a prime example of wasteful and damaging design, an architectural atrocity that has made you "famous" the country over.

Why is it that you cannot face up to these things? Why is it that you always have to cover up things with qualifying statements? I made one point fifteen months ago: "Do not just blame the present administration for the predicament in which you find yourself. Because it goes back -- far back." You know it. But you never admitted it in the past. And now when things really get rough, you are making some statements which I do not think are quite correct.

Yet, things are, maybe, changing, I hope. I agree with Leo Cain that there is a difference between 1964 and 1968. The increasing confrontation we have in this country in many fields, the sharpening of issues, may perhaps help you to have the courage to come to similar confrontations in this area. Healthy controversy is of greatest help toward producing change. Vigorous exchange of viewpoints should never be impeded. And if you have the opportunity to discuss things in meetings like this and debate issues straightforwardly, you certainly should try and do so, and not equivocate, just to be polite.

After all, President Kennedy's panel spoke out very forthrightly that throughout the country the quality of care in our institutions was low, was highly objectionable. Mental Retardation 67, the first report of the President's Committee on Retardation, used much harsher words, saying "many of these institutions are plainly a disgrace to the nation and to the state that operates than." This year's report, MR 68, signed -- may I say -- by two eminent Californians, one of them sitting here and the other sitting in Los Angeles, said "Many of the nearly 200,600 residents in state institutions for mentally retarded live in disgraceful conditions which the state's own regulatory agencies would not tolerate in private facilities." And, of course, I am mindful that one of the speakers today pointed this out and appealed to you to try and translate this into action.

If official government reports can use this kind of language, why should you have this terrible need always to be so desperately polite? You see, we are not attacking individual human beings. What we are talking about is a system, a system which -- I repeat -- has been in existence for a long time. You deal with an establishment, a bureaucracy, a professional power structure with various other power structures attached to it, and this cannot be blamed, when it manifests itself in any one location on individual persons.

Dr. Vail, the head of the institutions in Minnesota for mental illness and mental retardation, had the courage to write a book entitled "Dehumanization and the Institutional Career", in which he mercilessly presents a detailed documentation of the many ways in which institutions serving the mentally ill and the mentally retarded go about stripping away from the residents their human dignity, their identity, their motivation, their privacy, their basic human rights. He got the evidence from his own institutions. He has not resigned. But he has clearly identified the evils he wants to fight. And unless you clearly identify the things that need to be changed in California, you cannot really expect change to occur. Pointing them out does not have to be accompanied by blaming individuals. I say this over and over again. Because what we are addressing ourselves to are conditions which by far precede the individuals now in office.

Now let me come more specifically to some of the problems we discussed here today. First I would like to make a suggestion to you. The Governor of a State is not a person who can act on his own; he is facing, and has to work with distinguished citizens of the state who represent the highway lobby, and distinguished citizens of the state who represent the retail merchants lobby and so on and so on. I need not take your time by reciting this. So, maybe some time you need to get a little help for the Governor by more vigorously recruiting a lobby from the general public on behalf of the retarded. And I would say if we cannot get administrative relief, if the administration assures us that they do not see how they can do more, that they do all they can do, let us use an important traditional weapon our system of government makes available to us -- let us go to the courts.

Some very interesting things are happening in this country. A little while ago, the Supreme Court, on the petition of an individual, issued a very important decision -- the Gualt decision -- which is resulting in a very radical change in the way in which we are treating juvenile delinquents in this country. Administrative relief had not been forthcoming, somebody went to the court, the court reaffirmed certain principles, and now we have change.