Eiri Amach na Casca
" Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old--and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself."
-- Port Huron Statement
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
I was talking with my younger son yesterday about the social-political environment of today. In my opinion, his thinking is representative of his generation. As such, it is another link in the unbroken chain of American citizens that want to make the United States live up to its potential of becoming a more perfect union.
No two links in this chain are identical. Each is molded in the context of their times. After my son left, and I continued talking to myself, I noted how some of what he said reminded me of Tom Hayden's "Port Huron Statement." That powerful document has become obscure these days, despite it having once been central to the thinking of my generation. Yet even my own generation appears to have relegated it to being a footnote of a long past time.
I can't claim to have known Tom Hayden well. Most of what I knew came from reading. I did communicate with him lat in his life, and we discussed an interview for the Democratic Underground. I was curious the potential differences in thinking of the older Tom Hayden, with experience in holding poliical office, compared to the idealistic young man who wrote the Port Huron Statement. However, health issues kept postponing the interview, and eventually ended his life.
A lot has changed since the Statement came out in 1962. One could reasonably say the past is the past. A lot of changes have been positive -- I note, for example, that I was not forced to get up early this morning to attend Drake's Temple. Yet I remember Faulkner's saying that "the past is never dead. It's not even past."
Has my generation, despite our best efforts -- or what we pretend were our best efforts -- become our parents and grandparents? Confident that the idealism of the younger generations is misplaced and unrealistic? And that's not to say that it isn't, in many cases. Of course it is, or it would be realistic rather than idealistic.
Our generation dared to dream. And, as my late friend Rubin told me in 1974, it is only the fool who attempts the unrealistic who can be the hero who achieves the impossible. I think that spirit needs to rise from the dead.
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