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Anyhow, self-improvement is not incompatible with sociability. Even joggers have been known to donate to the United Fund. Such matters ought also to be spread on the record—but without any intent to identify the '70s as the "civic decade." It has, unquestionably, been a confused time, neither here nor there, neither the best nor worst of times, as free of a predominant theme as of a singular direction. Maybe the reason is not even visible. Maybe the little energy left over from the '60s got mostly spent, in secret, on assimilating and liquidating the traumas and griefs of that overlong epoch. If so, then perhaps the most memorable thing about the '70s has been simply that, as Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, "nothing disastrous is happening." Such a historical pause may not at the moment seem worth remembering — but it will as soon as disaster drops among us again.
— Frank Trippett