Reconciling the Generations

When I was teaching at Dakota Wesleyan University 15 years ago, the country was disturbed by "the silent generation" of college students. Young Americans seemed to be fitting too easily into lives of personal gain while ignoring the deprivations suffered by their fellow man abroad and at home. In the early Sixties, these misgivings turned to enthusiasm for the new activism of the young. Inspired, perhaps, by an appealing young President, youthful idealists seemed more moved by causes than by careers, more interested in the Peace Corps than in the stock market, more attracted to adventure than to self-aggrandizement.

Now the country is again in anguish over the conduct of its youth. The leaders of our Government have branded some of the young as "new barbarians," "tyrants" and "ideological criminals." Those university officials who lay down a tough line on student disorder have emerged as minor political heroes. And many Congressmen, especially those once concerned that Government would be too heavily involved in education, now support legislation that would make university discipline a function of the Federal Government.

Explanations for the disenchantment of the young are sought everywhere. Psychiatrists and sociologists are summoned regularly to Washington to explain the depredations of the more demonstrative college students. We hear variously that the young are engaged in a subconscious search for authority or that they are rioting because they hate themselves or their parents. I believe that the causes and complaints of most of our younger citizens are neither so complicated nor incomprehensible. The majority of those young Americans who are seriously at odds with our politics and our policies are moved by the same idealism that we hailed at the beginning of the past decade. There is, of course, a small percentage who seem bent only upon an irresponsible rejection of all authority and discipline, including the discipline of personal effort. This group includes those who have been spoiled by affluence and permissiveness, who lack the strength to cope creatively with the frustration that is inevitable in a pluralistic society. It also includes those so bitterly angered by the outrages of our national life that they can no longer muster the patience to work within an ofttimes slow political and social process.

Most importantly, however, there is a large group of young people who protest our present values because they earnestly seek an improved world. They call not for the destruction of America but for its redemption. They reject violence as a tool of national policy abroad or as a means of bringing about change in our own society. They seek to square the practices of the nation with its ideals. Consider these words from a young man facing jail for draft resistance: "Freedom is a heavy responsibility, which says to me that I must actively oppose that which is destructive around me and at the same time build that which I feel is needed. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't live my beliefs." Those are hardly the words of a barbarian or an ideological criminal.

The new generation scorns hypocrisy and sham. Freed from many of the demands and trials endured by their parents, the youth of this generation insist that the promise of America be fulfilled for all citizens--that we worry less about the gross national product and more about the quality of our society. These young Americans do not accept a scale of values that permits millions of Americans to (continued on page 132)Reconciling Generations(continued from page 126) suffer malnutrition while we spend billions of dollars on an ill-conceived new anti-ballistic-missile system. They find it understandably irrational to offer their lives to save a political regime in Saigon that does not have the respect of its own people.

In the best sense, the values of our young people are still the values of their parents. They have, however, the freedom of the young to press for those values without diluting or compromising them. The constraints of age, of job, of family do not weigh so heavily upon them. Recognizing that an age of rapid change is even more painful for parents than for their children, we "adults" desperately need to hear the frank, sometimes harsh but usually honest idealism of our young people.

Unfortunately, adult America seems increasingly baffled by its young--by their hair styles, their loud music, their willingness to take grievances into the streets, their refusal to be wedged into social roles they don't believe in. Frankly, I am not yet prepared to accept all of the youth rebellion, nor am I sure that its end product will be totally constructive, that its final influence on our national policies will be entirely beneficial. But I believe I understand some of the things that are bothering young Americans today--because they are bothering me. The causes and complaints of most young dissidents are just. We would do well to heed their pleas, to listen to what they are saying and to remedy the injustices they are pointing out so vehemently. We can hardly profit from the idealism of the young if we systematically exclude their views from our political life and our national policies. And we must avoid at all costs what one writer has called "a war against the young." For, as Fred Dutton of the California Board of Regents has correctly observed, "A society that hates its young people has no future."

In the developing discontent of the young, no factor has been more important than the war in Vietnam. It is no coincidence that the age group most strongly resisting the war--an estimated 25,000 young men are now actively refusing induction and some 5000 have virtually renounced citizenship to seek sanctuary abroad--is the same age group that is sustaining the heaviest casualties in the war. More than 40,000 have died; over 200,000 have been wounded; millions of others are racked by doubts and fears about the validity of our war policy and about what it holds for them.

The draft is a further focus of discontent. As now structured, it excuses those who can afford higher education, usually for a period long enough to allow that group to opt out of a particular conflict. The students themselves recognize the inequitable burden this places upon the poor and the less academically able. And they recognize that local boards administer the draft according to their own whims; the Selective Service regulations are too often used as a means of punishing dissent.

The arms race is another cause of student unrest. This generation has been reared through the years of the Cold War. They have seen the splitting of the Communist world; they have endured the "balance of terror" and they now wish to turn away from an international situation in which stability is maintained by threats of mutual annihilation. They understand that we have reached a point at which the simple addition of arms and bombs no longer guarantees security; that such mindless escalation of the arms race means only the loss of security. The young people of this country feel that the time has come for public dollars to be spent on crying domestic needs, rather than on foreign intervention and on new methods of destruction. They understand that only by strengthening the fabric of our own society will we increase our ultimate national security.

These perceptions are, of course, not limited to the young. But the young, especially during the national elections of 1968, provided much of the energy necessary to spread these ideas throughout the national electorate. It has become obvious to nearly everyone by now that political and social reforms are necessary. But the longer needed reform is delayed, the longer we turn away from our young people and their concerns, the greater the chance that their idealism and activism will turn to cynicism and hate.

Students themselves, however, must bear a share of the blame for the growing alienation of the older generation. It is the naïve assumption of some young radicals that a flamboyant, if not violent, confrontation with authority will somehow destroy that authority. But as the news pictures of confrontation at Cornell and elsewhere have gone across the nation, the fear and anger of adults have served only to harden the insensitive authoritarianism that student radicals hoped to destroy. As the public's hostile reaction to student take-overs spreads, the willingness to reform diminishes. The use of violence by either side in a confrontation is seized upon by the other as the justification for counterviolence. Together, they divert national attention to violence rather than to its causes. Most tragically, the university, which should be a dynamic community of scholars and a testing place for ideas, becomes paralyzed.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose early diagnosis of America's racial problems is still among the most incisive, has warned: "The danger in violence is that after it, comes a demand for law and order. And throughout history, law and order has been a pretext for not making the fundamental reforms needed." In the early stages of urban ghetto rioting, it was thought by some that such disorders, despite their ugliness and destruction, would awaken America to the needs of the cities. While the riots did produce a commission that recommended a massive national commitment to eradicate urban blight and racism, the country's answer to Watts, Harlem, Detroit and Newark has been continued procrastination. The swiftest response to urban riots has come from the Pentagon, which, without public debate and virtually without public notice, is spending more than $300,000 to monitor urban trouble spots. Army counterintelligence personnel collect information in our cities to support contingency plans aimed at handling simultaneous riots in as many as 25 cities. Intelligence surveys have already been made on college campuses. Congressional committees have conducted strenuous investigations of student organizations they suspect of being subversive.

The lesson of the nation's response to urban disorder should not be ignored by students who believe that force will bring an end to the ailments of our society. Young Americans should recognize that it makes little sense to condemn violence in Asia while precipitating it on campus. It makes no sense to challenge the political demonology of American leaders who believe in a monolithic Communist conspiracy while constructing an equally simplistic demonology of American politics. It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, that all adults are unsympathetic, that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

Unfortunately, students and young activists have learned a good deal from the example of their elders. What are we to say about the importance of restraint and the peaceful resolution of differences when we have unleashed unspeakable violence and horror on the people of Vietnam? Or, again, we condemn campus disorder, but what of the authorities who have retaliated in fear and violence? We saw this in Chicago in the summer of 1968 and we have seen it at the University of California. Over the innocent issue of a park, a young man died in Berkeley, and others were injured by shotguns, beaten in the streets, sprayed with toxic gas from military helicopters. The rampage of official violence demonstrates that many of our leaders do not believe in the peaceful democratic process; rather, they see the resolution of dispute turning on who has the most troops and guns and is most ready to use them.

The question we must all face is not whether there will be a revolution among (continued on page 266)Reconciling Generations(continued from page 132) our young. In many ways, that revolution has already taken place. Polls and surveys repeatedly point to the fact that the brightest and best educated of our young people already hold attitudes significantly different from those of the generations that have preceded them. Biologists and sociologists tell us that our young people are maturing faster. They are ready earlier to take responsible roles in our society. Yet we deny them real participation in most of our institutions.

Young adults under 21 can vote in only four states, but 18-year-olds are subject to the fullest penalties of the adult legal code. Worst of all, our 18-year-old men are expected to fight our wars. It is long past the time when young adults should be not only listened to but urged to participate fully in our society. Young adults deserve a voice in the activities of our national political parties and in the selection of our Government officials. It is not enough, however, to urge participation. In too many cases, the institutions by which change is to be engineered have fossilized beyond the point where they provide any meaningful channels for the hopes of the young. My party--the Democratic Party--is a case in point. Through the Reform Commission, which I chair, created in the wake of the turbulent Democratic National Convention, we have been laboring to correct that situation, to avoid a repetition of the 1968 experience, in which the constructive energy of the young encountered so much frustration. I cannot promise the young that political channels will be completely opened by 1972, that our institutions will be fully democratic and responsive, although that is the goal of my commission. But it is important that the leaders of our major parties--and of other established institutions in our society--understand that the question is not who will control these organizations but, rather, whether the organizations will continue to exist at all. We can be sure that unless there is a new responsiveness in the old institutions, the young people of this country--and others shut out by the atrophy of our democratic processes--will ignore them or seek to bring them down by their own improvised means.

Those institutions that serve the young must be especially open to renewal. Certainly, students deserve a voice in the government of their colleges and universities. Certainly, we must end the hypocrisy of a community of scholars demanding academic freedom while selling its brains and soul to a war machine. And surely we need to develop a mutually respectful dialog between students and faculty, to break the dreary syndrome of lectures, cramming, exams and grades. There is little prospect of peace on our campuses until there are substantial reforms in our national institutions, until the colleges and universities themselves provide vitally relevant experiences for our young people, until our national goals and priorities are restructured.

Indeed, the entire direction of our society, and even the tone of our leaders, is important if there is to be a reconciliation between the generations. As we know, it is not just the young who are alienated; there is a sense of national alienation, a sense of atomization and frustration among many, perhaps most, Americans. Richard Nixon may have sensed this when he adopted as a post-campaign slogan the plea of a sign carried by a young girl to Bring us Together. But more than slogans and rhetoric are required. I believe there will be no end to the alienation of the young nor to the disenchantment of adults nor to the rage of minority groups until there is a new direction in American society. That direction must be toward doing things with people rather than to them.

Young Americans have been among the most sensitive to these failures in American life. Lacking the awe of their fathers for the great technological advances of the past decade, young people are not able to substitute a sense of triumph over the moon landings, for example, for a true triumph of human concern over the welfare of those back on earth. That machines work, that computers compute, that the nation is wealthy, that we produce more cars and television sets than any other country--all this is no solace. It is, rather, a mocking reminder to the young that their society has spent its time and money on gimmicks and not on people.

Translated to problems of national leadership, the priorities I have outlined call us beyond the systems and ideas of the past 20 years. President Nixon has taken one step in that direction by announcing a fundamental change in the welfare system. Rather than a simple dole, the President asked for a rudimentary system of national income maintenance, combined with an emphasis on "workfare" rather than welfare. This change is a step toward greater dignity. Unfortunately, the President didn't go far enough. Where are the plans to create those jobs that the President wishes welfare recipients to assume? His scheme would, in many states, leave welfare recipients less well off than they are now. What prevented the President from making his plan real instead of rhetorical was money. His strong advocacy of the multibillion-dollar anti-ballistic-missile system must be judged against the inadequacy of his welfare program. If a national commitment to human welfare is the key to reuniting our society, the President's criticism of Congress for adding a billion dollars to his meager education budget will do little to bring the country together.

The President and his lieutenants also seem intent upon gathering about the Republican Party all those Americans who are plagued with fear about disorder. In this effort, the President and, especially, Attorney General John Mitchell are doing nothing to quell the legitimate fears of the country about violence. Rather, lacking a serious dedication to law and order as a natural consequence of justice, the President is offering tough rhetoric and a few more policemen as solutions to a complex problem. We know the causes of violence on the campus, yet the Administration ignores them. Violence in the city is a result of the unspeakable conditions there, yet the President has offered nothing substantive--other than campaign promises to promote black capitalism, now ignored within the Administration--to remove the roots of that violence. Never has the Administration tried to explain that while the poor commit most crimes of violence, so are the poor most often the victims of personal violence. What can we expect of citizens long denied their fair share of the economic pie? The Administration in its first year set about slowing the integration process in the South. Can we expect tranquillity from Americans whose souls have been brutalized for 200 years?

Young Americans are in many ways forecasting a set of attitudes and values that will be increasingly shared by Americans of all ages in years to come. They will not settle for a national leadership that is less than candid and less than sincere in its devotion to improving the quality of life for all Americans. What must the young have thought when President Nixon last summer characterized the tragic war in Vietnam as "America's finest hour," or when he described our landing on the moon as "the greatest event since the creation"?

Young people, like a growing number of others in our society, are deeply but justifiably resentful. As Archibald MacLeish told students at the University of California: "[It] is not a resentment of our human life but a resentment on behalf of human life, not an indignation that we exist on the earth but that we permit ourselves to exist in a selfishness and wretchedness and squalor, which we have the means to abolish." When the President and other American political leaders fully understand Mr. MacLeish's point, Americans of all ages will begin coming together.

Having said all this to the nation's leaders, what can be said to the young themselves? The country is faced with a dilemma: At a time of critical need for change, its channels and procedures for bringing about change are malfunctioning. The millions of young people who worked for Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy accomplished a great deal. Surely, that effort is a model for political and social involvement. What the young people in the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns did was to begin an unfinished revolution. Those two men represented a new departure from the prevailing mode of political action. Both men were in the process of putting together important new--although differing--coalitions of American voters. If there is to be a new direction in American society, it must begin with a new combination of voters interested in providing that new direction.

It seems to me that the most important challenge now before the youth of this country is to work toward forming such a new coalition--a coalition of the young, the poor and the oppressed minorities, of the workingman left in the wake of a changing technological society, of the educated affluent who now recognize that the goals of society are out of joint.

A voting "coalition of conscience" needs to be formed and mobilized. The energy and inventiveness of young people are absolutely indispensable to the success of such a coalition. Toward this end, I would urge young people to take an active part in every political campaign that they can reach. If there is no candidate that suits their interest, let them find out, help him organize his campaign, assist him in the research and writing of speeches and position papers, ring doorbells and distribute literature. Such efforts will no doubt produce frustrations, but fewer frustrations, I would guess, than those that come with physical confrontation. While confrontation can't be totally ignored, it can be contained. An activist coalition of involved citizens must be reckoned with by any candidate, whether he runs against it or with it.

Many of the young people who were disappointed in 1968 concluded that their cause had been beaten. Yet while their efforts fell short, it was, in fact, only the beginning. If the processes of American politics are atrophied, if the means to bring into reality the wishes of the people are now blocked, the only remedy possible is the election of men who will make the necessary changes. I would suggest to young Americans that the political process, with all its flaws, still offers the best hope of realizing the goals they are concerned about.

This kind of effort is a matter of work, of hard sacrifice, of laboring in the cause of men who may not be perfect but who offer the best prospect for remaking this country in an image acceptable to concerned Americans. I would urge young people to enlist in an unrelenting campaign against excessive military spending, against a foreign policy of mindless interventionism, in the effort to democratize our political process and to redeem the American environment, so that life is better for all Americans. The way to wage that battle is with political candidates. Every politician needs manpower and ideas--fresh and vital ideas rooted in the sensitivity that the young can best provide. "To influence men who struggle," as Jean-Paul Sartre has written, "one must first join their fight."