A world of difference.

For some time now I have been telling friends that I think I will call the memoir of the last twenty-five years on which I have been working From Another Country to emphasize how different the world into which I was born was from the world in which we live today.

Now, having just plowed through the accumulated mail after a short vacation, I am thinking of calling it A Word I Never Made. The magazines, the newsletters, even the personal letters, taken all together give a kaleidoscopic view of a world in which things have gone awry or are passing strange. I find the cumulative effect of such a concentrated overview bewildering or depressing.

Take first the periodicals: On the cover of the Washingtonian, our local city magazine, is the picture of a healthy, happy fifteen-month-old named Hannah. Inside is the story of how her mother, a single, college-educated professional woman in her thirties, selected her father from among the anonymous donors to a sperm bank.

Hannah' s mother is aware of the difficulties Hannah may face in the future, but she is reassured by the experiences of women in the support group called Single Mothers by Choice. From them and their children, Hannah will learn that her situation is not unique. The group has 2,000 members nationwide. The local chapter has 50 members--most of them professional women in their late thirties and early forties.

What am I to make of this? Certainly I cannot wish that Hannah not exist. Nor can I want to deny the joys of motherhood to so many intelligent, productive women. Yet Hannah's story implies a daunting gamut of moral problems posed by choices in the field of reproduction and "advances" in the field of genetics. Choosing a father from a sperm bank seems less problematic when I think of surrogate mothers, embryonic beginnings in a dish, frozen multiple embryos and the controversies over who owns them, etc. And genetic engineering is a science in its infancy!

Hannah's mother's choice would have been unimaginable to me and my contemporaries when we were her age, as would have been the choices of those in her support group. Hence I cannot judge these choices in terms of the morality I took for granted in the first three or four decades of my life. The complexities are too various and numerous.

Another, to me, bewildering cover story appears in the next magazine in the pile, the New Republic for March 14. It is subtitled, "What Happens When Prozac Meets Universal Health Care?" The author, Robert Wright, raises questions about mentalhealth care that suggest that we may in some ways have caught up with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given the advances in chemical cures for mental illness, it is possible for the government to make all unhappy people, if not quiescent like Orwell's people, at least happy.

The Clinton health plan, Wright points out, calls for mental-health coverage for those with diagnosable mental illnesses, including those that impair function "in the family, work, school, or community activities." That coverage could include treatment by psychotherapy or psychopharmacology (treatment by mind-alerting drugs). Mental-health advocates like Ira Magaziner and Tipper Gore point to the latter as cheaper and more certain treatment.

Wright uses the example of Prozac to illustrate the problem thus presented: What does it mean if the government approves, even provides, a drug that alters the personality? Does it bear some responsibility for altering the patient's biochemistry-- his or her physical self? Prozac now is the preferred antidepressant of the affluent. It raises self-esteem. The Prozac personality is "upbeat, self-assured, efficient." But it may also be egocentric and less given to concern for others than heretofore. Clearly then a "Prozac cure" for the individual may have larger social effects. Wright argues that when recommended drugs affect the conscience or sexual impulses of those who take them, the government is making moral policy. Drags that are safe and effective and make the patient feel better, it seems, may do more harm to society as a whole. These, surely, are the problems of a world never envisioned when we first made mental health a cause.

And then come the continuing problems-not so much bewildering as depressing. First of all the problem of the inculcation of hatred as described in Time's February 28 issue with Louis Farrakhan on the cover. Just as the outbreaks of ethnic hatred in Europe were eventually unleashed by our well-meant doctrine of self-determination, our civil rights movement made continuing racism more visible and had its strange by-product in Farrakhan's message of hatred.

The fostering of hate is not reserved for that between the races. In one of the piledup newspapers I read of a black musician who says he is exhausted by black-on-black cruelty and irresponsibility and the pressure put upon him to excuse it. He talks about "gangsta rap" where practitioners sing about killing black men and abusing black women, thus fomenting mindless hatred.

In the same paper I read of the growing movement to allow relatives of victims to witness the execution of criminals--this in the state of Virginia, "the mother of presidents," which, alas, puts more murderers to death in a year than all but two other states. Certainly this trend toward witnessing executions certifies hatred as much as it brings "closure," as the proponents claim. One thinks of the old man on the subway quoted in the New York Times on March 2: "It's all hate," he said. "I'll be glad when I'm dead and gone. The world used to be a good place." We must sympathize with him--we who were once so sure that the interracial justice we worked for was inevitable and that capital punishment would soon be abolished. What happened to the world we tried to make?

Although I am inclined to claim that our present unhappy turbulent world is one I never made, I cannot be totally sure of that. So often, in life' s queer ironies, the well-intentioned has unintended consequences. Any change has multiple effects. Too many changes, too quickly brought about, may have loosened us from our moorings.

And the mail is full of news from people who struggle on to make things right. Amnesty International reminds me of the 40,000 prisoners of conscience and victims of torture released by its efforts all over the world. The Citizens for Nuclear Safety ask for support for an initiative to convene a presidential commission on nuclear waste to deal with the dangers of radiation-contaminated sites throughout the country (recently revealed to be in the thousands). The Catholic Worker, the members of So Others May Eat (SOME), the workers for The Second Harvest Food Bank, and so many others try to feed the hungry. Others struggle to shelter the homeless. Police athletic clubs offer recreation to youngsters off the street. So many pleas. And all important.

Last of all, the personal letters remind me that the world is still a place in which friendships flourish and are nurtured by the marvels of modern communication. One may call home via credit card from a village in New Guinea to a house in Connecticut, as one of my friend' s son did, or Fax daily letters from Bangkok to wife and children in Washington, as did another. Distance no longer separates.

It is different from the world I was bom into; it is full of that which I mourn and deplore; but it is the only world we have and the one in which we must live and work and strive to do better.