In a time of peace, heroes are in, protest is out and worries are muted
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
—Thomas Hardy
There is no evidence as Americans enter 1978 that they share Hardy’s aesthetic view and prefer chaos to calm. For the first time in more than a dozen years, abroad and at home the nation is at peace and clearly enjoying it. Sons do not go off to die in foreign fields, and daughters do not end their lives making bombs for a war at home. The crime rate, particularly for murder, is way down. The hatreds that lashed American cities, while not cured, are curbed. The humiliations of political deceit no longer command headlines. Nor do the headlines command: reveal, resign, withdraw, withstand.
Peace, Shakespeare’s “dear nurse of arts, plenties and joyful births,” succors national life at last. Broadway and region al theater flourishes; attendance at museums is the highest in history. In December the first child was born in the new homeland of a tribe of America’s oldest people, the Mohawk Indians, who won a piece of state land at Ganienkeh, N.Y., after a three-year struggle. Indeed, both the nation’s birth and marriage rates rose in 1977. Though serious problems persist in the U.S., a sense of well-being and restored community pervades.
In Boston, hundreds of artists and performers labored to prepare free, outdoor art shows and concerts for a New Year’s Eve celebration. Like a scene from a 19th century print, Bostonians by the tens of thousands will wend their candlelit way past sculpture and singers, gathering on the Common for fireworks and communal cheer. In Beverly Hills, Calif, 2,000 people had been expected at a modest tree-lighting ceremony; 15,000 showed up. The once tattered social fabric is being rewoven. Across the country, charities report sharp increases in donations of all kinds. In Portland, Ore., the United Way fund drive not only met but exceeded its goal for the first time in a decade. Said Drive Director Howard Studd: “We’re really a good barometer of psychological attitudes. People are feeling relaxed and confident about the future. We’re coming off a couple of rough years—Viet Nam, Watergate, inflation, unemployment. People had lost faith in the public institutions. Maybe they’re regaining their faith.”
Certainly the wounds are healing, even those most painful wounds of old wars. At Christmas-week talks with U.S. officials in Paris, Vietnamese representatives agreed to intensify their search for the remains of American servicemen still listed as missing in action. This spring a delegation from Hanoi will visit Hawaii to study maps showing presumed locations of downed U.S. planes. After more than 30 years of bureaucratic machinations and court litigation, 52 Filipinos last week were finally granted the U.S. citizenship promised to all aliens who joined the American armed forces during World War II.
For the future, there is the hope, indeed the belief, that a chastened America will mediate, not intervene, in remote foreign fights. Nancy Lindborg, a guidance counselor in Orlando, Fla., gazed across the dinner table at her daughter, home from her freshman year at college. As Mrs. Lindborg recalls, “I thought, ‘If there’s a war, it’s her generation.’ And then it flashed through my mind, ‘There’s not going to be a war.’ ”
The domestic wars have simmered down as well. For three years, the Christmas holidays at South Boston High School had merely meant a lull in the racial conflict over busing. This year school officials have unplugged the airport metal detectors once used to screen students for weapons, the police have been removed from the halls, and Southie students are at peace. Said one kid: “After a while, you get to know them. You just get along.” In Chicago, one of the nation’s most stubbornly segregated cities, a new busing program drew angry words this fall but no violent resistance. Once citizens took to the streets to denounce court rulings. Now a Miami Dolphins fan took to the sky to protest the injudiciousness of a National Football League referee whose early whistle on a fumble cost the local heroes a playoff spot. NFL … BAD CALL, the skywriter spelled out. It’s a far cry from IMPEACH EARL WARREN.
Boston TV reporters regularly ask citizens, “What’s bugging you?” —and lately a startling number of them have replied, “Nothing.” Pollsters report that the people may be fretful and uncertain about the nation’s economy, but they are remarkably confident about their own economic futures. The close-in issues of inflation and unemployment, energy and taxes top the worry lists in all the polls, but concerns about far-off Russia or Africa are way down on the list. Despite the ravages of inflation, the median U.S. family’s income rose in 1977, and 92 million Americans are now working, up from 86 million in November 1974. The hottest country-and-western hit is Johnny Paycheck’s good-natured, blue-collar cry for the freedom to find work that satisfies as well as sustains: Take This Job and Shove It.
Unfortunately, that sentiment is a luxury for more than 6 million Americans—mostly blacks and Hispanics, women and youths—who are unemployed. Pressure from imports in many industries, notably steel, clothing and electronics, threatens more jobs. Along with rising cries for protectionism, there are some encouraging attempts at selfhelp. The shutdown of an old Youngstown Steel plant devastated that Ohio city, but municipal leaders and Youngstown Steel employees have begun a search for a new owner and are investigating a plan to take over the plant and operate it as a community-owned enterprise.
Still to be reckoned are the dislocations, in lifestyle and in the workplace, that the energy crisis holds in store. However blissfully its implications are ignored today, very real changes lie ahead. Not all of them will be bad, of course. There may well be economic surges in the nation’s resource-rich areas, particularly those that have previously been left behind: the coal-rich regions of Appalachia; the intermountain West, which is a trove of oil, shale and uranium; the farm belt of the Midwest, now suffering from depressed prices but likely to prosper from future demands on the American cornucopia by a hungry, yearning world.
As the new year begins, most Americans find that the struggle of their times has eased and life is softer, somehow simpler. Women’s fashions feature clinging fabrics and frills after a decade of jeans and tailored austerity. The top bestseller is The Silmarillion, the final whimsy from the pen of J.R.R. Tolkien. Easy Rider Peter Fonda is out of work, while an intergalactic black hat/white hat western—with a robot named Artoo Detoo playing Henry Kissinger on space-shuttle diplomacy—sets box-office records. Star Wars is a winner, says Marquette University Sociologist Wayne Youngquist, “because it’s a story of good guys v. bad guys, and the good guys win. We have this hunger for heroes again. This is not an era of antiheroes.”
Some of the biggest heroes are athletes. Tampa exploded with joy after two straight wins by its doormat football team. The bestselling book in Oregon is an account of the Portland Trail Blazers’ championship season in pro basketball. In Denver, Bronco T shirts, coffee mugs, stocking stuffers are sold out at most stores. As Youngquist also notes, “Athletes are back to being respectable people on campus again.” Upon his appointment as president of Yale, A. Bartlett Giamatti admitted that his principal ambition had been to become president—of the American League.
The loudest noise on campuses is the grind for grades. Corporate recruiters draw record crowds of students and bring good tidings; job prospects for June grads are the brightest in many years. Student demonstrations are rare, and when they do erupt, the protest is not against some big political issue but local tuition increases. “We are definitely apathetic,” says Eric Mowrey, Haverford ’78, “but it is a beneficial apathy, an apathy of satisfaction. We have been through enough for a while. We need a break. Now we can go forth and party without feeling a sense of remorse.”
The new morality, it turns out, is really the old. Affection and fealty are still the goals of personal relationships, even in a narcissistic, superficially hedonistic society. Marijuana is widely accepted now, but alcohol continues a comeback of dubious sorts: drink, not dope, is the principal drug of abuse among the young. Dancing is in, and so is eating out.
Christmas giving set new records for retail sales after several so-so years. Sales of toys and flowers were particularly strong. A survey of 40 state governments projects a budget surplus for 1978, and with the extra money comes a dedication to spend wisely. The old ills and excesses, the nation has learned, are too costly—crushing in economic terms and incalculable in human terms. Chicago’s Cook County has spent $762,561 defending its public officials in lawsuits brought by the survivors of three Black Panthers gunned down by police in 1969.
How long will the nation’s gentler, easier mood last? Few people are searching for the answer. Says Atlanta Assistant Store Manager Norbert Stanislav: “There is always some dark presence around the corner if you look for it, but nobody’s looking for it.” Hail tranquillity.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com