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Most of us deny it, sincerely no doubt, but we are envious of the young. We were, after all, so close to having the same freedoms and so near to their new world. We are envious of something else: time and time again it has been the young who have led the way in attacking a war that many of us also believe is wrong. Older and better equipped to protest, more of us should have taken the initiative. No doubt many of us will always regret that we did not. Envious of them? Yes, but at the same time (and in total contradiction) we are also relieved that we are not their age. They have much more freedom than we had, but they also have much more pressure put upon them. Unlike us, they feel the hatred of the old, and they know that they must stand together under the banner of youth. At the same time, their frantic independence often hides a group conformity more deadening than anything we could have conceived in the conforming '50s. Being young in the '70s is excruciatingly more difficult than it was in the '50s.
• Our hearts are half with the young, but they are half with the old as well. We still sympathize, truly sympathize, with the "square" over-40s. Though we bear no scars from the Depression and "the war" —their twin traumas—both are the vivid memories of childhood to us, rather than cold, historical incidents in a textbook. We can understand, as the young cannot, why the older generation is afraid, and more sadly, why it is resentful of those who seem to have everything but gratitude. To both young and old, we are almost invisible. The young often see us as the cop-outs—as the shorthaired, button-down junior exec or the suburban housewife in a station wagon —and many of us are. Our parents and older brothers and sisters often see us as the fellow travelers of the youthful enemy, which many of us are too.
Yet we are ourselves, a disparate group that includes Eldridge Cleaver as well as Neil Armstrong, Tom Hayden as well as Ron Ziegler, Susan Sontag as well as Rod McKuen, Ralph Nader as well as Van Cliburn. Like any generation, we contain contradictions and exceptions, including those, particularly among the blacks, who want to burn and bury the system. But the revolutionaries among us, political or cultural, are a minority; reform, not revolution, is our aim. As a generation, we are distinguished by our lack of anger. Circled by fury, we are the unfurious; surrounded by passion, we are the dispassionate. Most of us by this time have made a commitment to the kind of country we want to live in, and often that commitment is pursued with all the energy and talent we possess. Still, it is a commitment based on reason; we are appalled, all of us, by the automatic reflexes of those younger or older than we are. Detached, observed always by that invisible third eye, we still find it impossible to deliver ourselves completely to slogans and ideologies. Even our rebels, our Jerry Rubins and Abbie Hoffmans, have a sense of irony. Our generation could not have produced a Mark Rudd —dour, humorless, and without even the smallest doubt that he might be wrong.
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