The Fourth Turning by William Strauss

Author:William Strauss [Strauss, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48505-2
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2009-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Boomers Entering Young Adulthood: Mystical Militants

“I Am a Student! Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate!” read the signs of pick-eters outside Berkeley's Sproul Hall in 1964, mocking the computer-punchcard treatment the faculty was supposedly giving them. Where earlier student movements had been the work of a lonely (and polite) few, this one swarmed and raged. The Free Speech movement rioters despised the life of “sterilized, automated contentment” that America's “intellectual and moral wastelands” were preparing for young graduates. As Barry McGuire's “Eve of Destruction” shot to the top of the pop charts, students at Berkeley resolved to “throw our bodies on the gears” to stop the G.I. machine.

Within a few years, America's finest universities were, like its inner cities and military depots, awash in youth violence. Often, the trouble started when administrators tried to clear a park or erect a building that would benefit students. Instead of praise, the G.I.s heard screams like Jacob Brack-man's: “You build it up, mother, we gonna tear it down.” Wealthy kids dressed down, donned unisex styles, and became self-declared “freaks” as if to reject the affluence and civic order of their elders. Back in 1962, the Silent-founded Students for a Democratic Society promoted social “interchange” and considered violence “abhorrent.” By the late 1960s, a radicalized SDS screamed at the “pigs” who tried to keep order, while youth violence became what Rap Brown called “as American as apple pie.” In 1970, 44 percent of college students believed that violence was justified to bring about change. The clenched fist became the emblem, T-shirts and jeans the uniform, and corporate liberalism the enemy. “Who are these people?” asked Daniel Moynihan, then on Harvard's faculty. “I suggest to you they are Christians arrived on the scene of Second Century Rome.”

In Do You Believe in Magic? Annie Gottlieb declared the Boomers “a tribe with its roots in a time, rather than place or race.” For her peers, that time was the 1960s, alias the Awakening. Born as the inheritors of G.I. triumph, Boomers came of age as what Michael Harrington termed “mystical militants” whose mission was neither to build nor to improve institutions but rather to purify them with righteous fire. America's new youths, observed Erik Erikson, were engaged in a “search for resacralization.” Where Silent youths had come of age eager to fine-tune the system, cutting-edge Boomers wanted it to “burn, baby, burn.” They had been raised to ask fundamental questions and apply fundamental principles. Among young radicals, Keniston noted the “great intensification of largely self-generated religious feelings, often despite a relatively nonreligious childhood.” This search for spiritual perfection was often aided by mind-altering drugs, which The Aquarian Conspiracy's Marilyn Ferguson described as “a pass to Xanadu” for “spontaneous, imaginative, right-brained youths.”

Boomers sought to be “together” people—not together like the G.I. uniformed corps of the 1930s, but together as in a synchronous “good vibration.” Boomers perceived their generational kinship as what Jonathan Cott called “the necklace of Shiva in which every diamond reflects every other and is itself reflected.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.