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Only the brave movie geneseo ny2/16/2023 ![]() Decter to take heart in our example, for our generation, like hers, will be capable “of facing, tolerating, or withstanding difficulty of any kind.” Rest assured, my generation will be like hers-led by the silent, nervous superachievers, intent on their material goal, lacking the time to question the madness of their method. We watch with banal, apathetic, unquestioning expressions as the collective “final authority on good and bad” (as Decter calls our parents) suggests renewed American involvement in Vietnam, as war is threatened over the price of oil, as famine spreads throughout the world, as unemployment lines begin to form. In fact, rather than be “self-regarding" flower children, they are so intent on pleasing “the Establishment” that in order to increase their chances of being admitted to medical school, for instance, many are willing to brave the risks of sabotaging other students’ lab experiments. Most students at universities around the country seek to become productive members of the “professional, enlightened, liberal middle class” Ms. In fact, we are now just at the age to become as effectively militant and iconoclastic as we dreamed of beings during our childhood. It was all, in its pitifully shallow way, very romantic, and in our minds, very grown-up. Sometimes we even added our high-pitched voices to the general adolescent din of antiwar protest. And, admittedly, in our shy way we all tried to be promiscuous. Like our older brothers and sisters, some of us boasted of having experimented with drugs. Decter’s critique? My friends and I grew our hair as wild and as appalling as our parents would let us, it is true. Where does all this place me and my peers in the scheme of Ms. The rapidly diminishing climax chord of the Woodstock Festival came at a time when I was too young even to be admitted to the R-rated film that was made of the concert, let alone travel “back to the garden” (as Joni Mitchell sings in a song about Woodstock). I am of an age group that should be called the true “lost generation.” Now eighteen, I was seven when Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’" I was in seventh grade when the SDS closed Columbia. Midge Decter’s pessimistic vision, as revealed in “A Letter to the Young,” evokes my pity.
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