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Among the fighting men, there is a good deal of the Peace Corps ardor that animates their peers back home.
Non-Protest Protest. In the U.S., for all the attention won (and sought) by their picket lines, petitions and protest marches, political activists on campus number at best 5% of the student bodies at such traditionally cause-conscious universities as Chicago, Columbia or California. At the majority of colleges and universities, there have been no student demonstrations against anything. At Shinier, a small (enrollment: 500) liberal arts college in Illinois, the undergraduates recently staged a rally to protest the lack of protest.
Indeed, despite his tolerance of quixotic causes and idiosyncratic roles, the Man of the Year reflects—more accurately than he might care to admit—many of the mainstream currents in society at large. In 1966, the young American became vociferously skeptical of the Great Society. Though he retains a strong emotional identification with the deprived and spurned citizens of his own and other societies, he recognizes that the civil rights revolution, in which he was an early hero at the barricades, has reached a stage at which his own involvement is no longer vital. And, as a letter to the President signed by 100 student leaders across the nation showed last week, he has become increasingly perturbed by the war (see box, p. 22).
In nearly all their variants, the young possess points of poignant common interest. From activists to acidheads, they like to deride their elders as "stick-walkers" and "sellouts." Fond of such terms as "fragmentation" and "anomie" in sketching their melodramatic self-portraits, many of them assume an attitude that borders on nihilism. To the standard adult charge of youthful irresponsibility, a young Californian can reply, as Authors J. L. Simmons and Barry Winograd show in It's Happening, with the emotional outrage of a John Osborne character:
"Look at you, brainwashing a whole generation of kids into getting a revolving charge account and buying your junk. (Who's a junkie?) Look at you, needing a couple of stiff drinks before you have the guts to talk with another human being. Look at you, making it with your neighbor's wife just to prove that you're really alive. Look at you, screwing up the land and the water and the air for profit, and calling this nowhere scene the Great Society! And you're gonna tell us how to live?
C'mon, man, you've got to be kidding!"
Instant Hedonism. Few organized movements of any description, from the John Birch Society to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
to the Christian church, have the power to turn them on. "We're not going to get in Wrigley Field and 'put one over the plate for Jesus baby,' " says a Georgia coed. Even union members have little sense of militancy. Having little fear that they will ever lack material comforts for their own part, the young tend to dismiss as superficial and irrelevant their elders' success-oriented lives. "You waited," sniffs a young Californian. "We won't." Nonetheless, today's youth appears more deeply committed to the fundamental Western ethos—decency, tolerance, brotherhood—than