A RUSSIAN revolutionary once suggested that everyone over 25 should be shot. His proposal was not adopted, but he might feel reasonably comfortable in the U.S. today. Nearly half of all Americans are now 25 or under, and the rest of the population, while not yet in danger of being liquidated, appears rather nervous and definitely on the defensive.
The situation is not exactly new. The man who first said "I don't know what the younger generation is coming to" probably died several thousand years ago. But Americans in the mid-1960s seem to have more reason than ever to lose their cool about the young. FBI statistics tell them that youngsters under 25 account for 73.4% of the arrests for murders, rapes, larcenies and other major crimes, and cause 31.5% of all traffic fatalities. Youth stages demonstrations in support of the country's enemies. Youth parades with placards of four-letter words. Youth scandalizes proud suburbs with grass parties—grass being one of the hippiest synonyms for marijuana. The latest campus fad seems to be underground "anti-universities" with courses in such subjects as revolution, "Search for the Authentic Sexual Experience" and hallucinogenic drugs. Boys look like girls, girls look like boys, and the songs they sing are not of love and laughter, but sour, self-pitying whines about how awful things are in a culture that supplies them with about $12 billion worth of such essential equipment as cars, clothes, acne lotions and hair sprays. The blaring jukebox message to the adult world seems to be: "Get oft of my cloud . . ."
Even liberal intellectuals can be shocked at the frequent failure of the young to take ideas seriously. Writes Critic Leslie Fiedler, 48: "Not only do they reject the Socratic adage that the unexamined life is not worth living, since for them precisely the unexamined life is the only one worth enduring at all. But they also abjure the Freudian one: 'Where id was, ego shall be,' since for them the true rallying cry is, 'Let id prevail over ego, impulse over order'—or 'Freud is a fink!' "
Freud is not the only fink. Marx and the Communists, at least in their Moscow incarnations, are just as Out with the new radicals, who prefer Peking and Havana. Complaining that the young are not really interested in ideology but only in protest for the sake of protest, Editor Irving Kristol, 42, notes that the same middle-aged critics like himself who so fervently condemned "the silent generation" of the '50s "are now considerably upset and puzzled at the way students are 'misbehaving' these days. One wants the young to be idealistic, perhaps even somewhat radical, possibly even a bit militant—but not like this! It used to be said that the revolution devours its children. It now appears that these children have devoured the revolution."
The Teen-Age International
This, of course, is a picture of a minority, and a noisy, one at that; the majority of American youth would say, "Not me." But the youth that makes the noise sets the tone, and the tone remains significant—and unique in comparison with the rest of the world. The noisy, "alienated" young are an American monopoly at the moment.