Youth and the Property Culture
Bacon, Margaret H.
Youth and the Property Culture by MARGARET H. BACON "TT'very good family deserves a gen-Ali eration gap," my nineteen year-old son tells me. He tells me most vociferously when I am telling him...
...Such experimenting is necessary for survival, as indeed the production of new life styles and new ideas has always been...
...The fear of being out of work, the fear of poverty which haunted our parents when we were growing up, is implanted in our very marrow...
...For people reared in the Depression, the notion that he who pays the piper calls the tune is slow to die...
...Could be that mankind is about to face an adaptation on the same scale as learning to walk on its hind legs...
...How nice, dear," Mother said soothingly...
...Though some of us overcame these fears enough to stand on picket lines and call ourselves socialists—or Marxists or Trotskyites—we never quite got over that fierce guardianship of private property which fear instilled...
...My daughter celebrates Earth Day by handing out free to passersby their fair share of the world's food—a cup of rice, a tea bag, and a piece of bread...
...Another, whose parents are by no means wealthy, lent his typewriter indefinitely to "some guys," his record player to some others...
...He tells me most vociferously when I am telling him that his ideas are not so different from mine at his age, and that through years of trial and error his father and I have been forced to modify certain hypotheses...
...Their attitudes toward sex and toward work are quite different from ours...
...This generation, reared in affluence, has none of the fear and none of the interest in keeping guard over the difference between mine and thine...
...A fourth gave up his job—horrors, quit a job...
...he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings...
...The young people under thirty are in fact casual about many matters which our generation regarded as almost sacred...
...May we look upon our treasures and the furniture in our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions or not...
...college-age offspring ought to be willing to do their share—go to classes, get passing grades, keep pot off the premises—a position to which the young seem to react with genuine bewilderment...
...one in which the ownership of private property will be considerably less sacred than it has been in the past...
...Even good socialists are not averse to arguing that since they pay the tuition bills their MARGARET H. BACON, a free lance writer, is on the staff of the Americans Friends Service Committee...
...These battles are not fought exclusively over the family breakfast table...
...Margaret Mead has suggested that this generation, the first to grow up in the post-atomic world, is like the first generation to be raised on new shores, while we, their parents, are at best immigrants, carrying old world ways with us on our backs...
...Could be that our choices today lie between extinction and a brave new world quite unimaginable to us at the moment...
...they have fewer hangups over sex and property (and many of our concepts of sex were based, as the women's liberation movement reminds us, on property...
...The way they dress and wear their hair is different...
...They appear to read and reason less...
...In his provocative book, Manual for Operating Spaceship Earth, Buckmin-ster Fuller reminds us that "evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about...
...The cousin didn't seem to mind very much...
...If we, their parents and employers, are truly liberal in the old best sense of that abused word, we ought to take a liberal attitude toward this experimenting: not eulogizing it, not accepting it uncritically, but suspending judgment until all the facts are in...
...to listen—to each other, as well as to their beloved big sounds—more...
...Parents who regarded themselves as student radicals a generation ago, and who now would identify themselves as liberals, if that word had not fallen so much into disfavor, find it particularly difficult to accept the idea that there is a gap between them and their offspring...
...The young do not respond to the argument that they owe an organization some loyalty just because they collect a paycheck from it, nor are they particularly concerned when it is pointed out to them by an elder who fancies himself fully sympathetic, that their life styles may endanger the organizaton's ultimate goals...
...and that culture, man's adaptive tool, has to be shaken from stem to stern to make this change possible...
...O that we who declare against wars and acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may . . , examine our foundation and motives in holding great estates," wrote Quaker John Woolman in the Eighteenth Century...
...Nevertheless, and painful as it is to admit it, today's young are different...
...They have different vices as well as different virtues...
...There is a relationship between my carefully nurtured green lawn and the defoliated trees of a Vietnam village...
...It is a whole way of life that began with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Puritan ethic which has served its time, and must go rapidly...
...But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring trans-cendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving...
...One eighteen year-old, having spent all his time and money for a year fixing up an old car, announced one day that he had simply given it to "some guy I know...
...because he didn't feel comfortable with the man he was working with...
...Above all they have a different attitude toward property and property arrangements, and it is over cars and allowances and contracts that radical elders quarrel with radical youngsters, perhaps as much as conservative parents quarrel with their youth...
...Or could it be part of their adjustment to a new world...
...Could be...
...Ecologists warn that unless we learn rapidly to share the earth's products equitably, there will not be much earth left to share...
...The older generation, my generation, has the Great Depression in its bones, whether or not all of us were its victims...
...My other daughter reminds me that avarice and hate, so nicely strained out of American middle class life, surface for all the world to see in the rice paddies of Vietnam and on the coffee plantations of Brazil...
...Comrades squabbled over the accounts, and communes split up over the question of who paid the last grocery bill, or who did the dishes Thursday night...
...But honesty compels us to admit that their ways of getting along are different...
...Perhaps all along it has served as a sort of smoke screen between us and reality...
...Yes," daughter answered coldly, "but that was just one of those old labor things...
...Nowhere did the concepts of personal discipline and strict honesty in matters of property come into fuller flower than Nineteenth Century England...
...I heard a story a few years ago about a young Berkeley rebel who called home, and in a tone of some triumph announced: "Mother, I'm in jail...
...It is not just the heritage of the Depression that accounts for parental hang-ups...
...they seem unaware of the emotional depth with which their elders view a contractual relationship...
...Did we raise them wrong...
...The ideology of these young people may not be so different from that of their parents...
...Man is very vain...
...My son asks me exactly how much longer it is going to be possible for the United States with seven per cent of the world's population to control forty per cent of the world's wealth...
...It isn't just that the concept is new to them...
...All my life I have been talking about the inequities between the have and the have-not nations, but it has taken my children to make me feel not just the pity, but the danger of this situation...
...Young writers, in my experience, seem consistently baffled when editors insist that they want only exclusive material...
...I was just your age when I first went to jail...
...Organizations dedicated to peace and social justice, and manned by yesterday's radicals and liberals whose heads are graying, report the same conflicts...
...A third borrowed his cousin's bicycle and forgot to return it...
...The post World War II young people have felt this relationship, as we have not, and though they sometimes seem perfectly happy to lie on the grass and eat the chicken, perhaps they will be better prepared than their parents to share when the time comes, as it must, that the choice is share or perish...
...Could it be that their new, relaxed attitude toward property, which so infuriates their elders, is an adaptation to an environment to come...
...It served as a powerful incentive to stay in school, to hold on to our first jobs, to keep track of our nickels and mend our socks...
...Yet at the same time middle class morality was used to cover up empire building as cruel and rapacious as the world has ever seen...
...Parents—liberal, concerned, sympathetic parents—all have similar stories to tell...
...Is this dishonesty...
...And we ought, in particular, to examine our own attitudes toward property to see if the disasters we fear—mislaid possessions, broken contracts, abused copyrights—are as dreadful as the disasters which an uptight, property-conscious culture is now visiting upon the rest of the world...
...They seem more sensitive to each other...
...Just as protozoa swarmed and mutations flourished in a thousand warm puddles until finally metazoa came into being, so, in a thousand communes and crash pads and folk festival sites, young people are experimenting with new ways of relating which may produce the models mankind needs for survival...
...between my poulet supreme and the salt fish served a Nigerian child...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
