| Thursday, October 6, 2005 |
16:28 - Perspective and soda
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
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You know, I've got to wonder: would today's Left, upon reading the Port Huron Statement (the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, the guys who turned the 1968 Chicago DNC into a riot), recognize themselves at all? Or would they be horrified? And what about vice versa?
It's a fascinating read, and I can't believe I've never taken the time to peruse it before. True, there are some large chunks of complete phantasmagoria. There are swathes of text anchored in nuclear paranoia and a sense of pre-Civil-Rights racial futility. It's a product of a different time, when the space race was brand-new and the economy was far more centered on huge Cold War government projects and sweatshop industry than on anything like the tech booms of today, and the text does indeed seem to be describing a totally different country than this one. There are the to-be-expected appeals for warmth toward organized labor and socialism and a resistance to knee-jerk anti-communism. With these things I'm sure today's Left would feel right at home.
But not with statements like "Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness" and "When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency."
Of course it all concludes with the statement that of course, college students are the natural inheritors of the reins of political power. Imagine the leap of logic it took a bunch of college students to say that.
The point is, while the document is full of all the usual talking points that have survived into present-day incarnations of Leftism, the thoughtfulness of its prose is completely gone in what I usually see today, and with it the heart that apparently used to underlie liberal thinking back in the day. I think the people who wrote this thing would be sickened to see the causes that those who consider themselves the Chicago Seven's spiritual descendants throw themselves into today.
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Brian Tiemann
