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Show Family Weekly/April 2, 1967 Are the youngsters of the 1960s happy? How are they meeting the challenges of our times? This famed author comes up with somestriking conclusions By HARRY GOLDEN Author of “Ex, Ess, Mein Kindt,” “A Uttle Girl Is Deod,”” “Only in America,” “For 2¢ Plain,” etc. se in order to make a point, a point we often miss. Parents who sacrifice for their children do not do so out of self-love as much as out of self-respect and out of a deep sense of the possibilities of the human spirit. Whether a father carries a sack of coal up five flights of stairs for 20 cents or gives a boy a Jaguar,it is really the same thing. Heis giving the boy “everything.” Butis it really “everything”? When I was graduated from Public School 20 on the Lower East Side, my classmates, some a year ahead of me, included George Gershwin, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, Jacob K. Javits—and I can name another dozen certainly equally worthy whoare today great surgeons or builders or employers of a vast army of working people. Out of the ghettoes of Little Italy, of Polishtown, of the Irish Hell’s Kitchen came thousands of men who have madetheir mark in the world. These are men who did not have automobiles or manicures when they were young and whose clothes were invariably hand-me-downs from an older brother or cousin. Yet we had it better; we had more advantages than Stanley de- barely two years older than Stanley who helped fragment this world, a boy named Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914.” Thatassassination brought on World WarI, and every youth thereafter was to grow upin an entirely different world. Ourchallenge before World War I was only to get out—to “make good.” Just think how relatively simple that was. “I want, to be a lawyer,” said one; and another said, “I hope to be an actor.” That was the sum total of the challenge. But the challenges facing Stanley today are much more complex, more serious, more deadly, if you will, than the challenges which confronted Paul Muni, George Gershwin, Edward G. Robinson, Jacob Javits, and me. Andin his way, Stanley is meeting those challenges. Just think how it was. When we were boys before 1914, the world was infinite. When the teacher talked of England, we thought of King Arthur and his knights; when she talked of France, we thought of Joan of Arc. And Washington, D.C., was the home of the President of the United States, who must be a great man because he had succeeded George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. spite the automobiles, the made-to-order clothes, and the manicure But Stanley's world is no longer infinite. Somehow ‘Stanley every week. We had greater advantages because the life we knew amidst poverty had a more hopeful quality, a richer texture than the life'the young folks now: see stretching before them. On the Lower East Side in the early years of this century, we came as close to any guarantee as life has ever offered. The guarantee was that if you worked hard, went to school, studied, and saved,-you could participate in America. Life offers no such guarantee today. There are millions of young senses that, of equal importance to his future, of equal importance to this pursuit of the good life, is the prime minister of Vietnam people unprepared and unfit to enter the automated industrial society of our era. We were poor in all these ghettoes, far poorer I suspect than the poor in America today, but we had a strategy for defeating poverty. And many of us gon. Those who did not win may have felt life was hard and cruel, but no one felt it was empty. Life today contains a major problem in the ever-increasing segregation of the poor and the elderly. In the old ghettoes of New York, grandmothers, grandfathers, and crotchety maiden aunts were a part of life and included in the whole. This is by and large not true today. The elderly live lonely lives in one housing development, and the young lead frenzied lives in another. We have telephones and radio and television, but communication between the age groups growsless and less distinct. In short, life is fragmented. And fragmented,it is hard to make sense of all the broken pieces. I’ve come to the conclusion that we had it much better than Stanley. Stanley needs understanding. ‘By an amazing coincidence, it was another kid, a young boy, or the new chief of staff in China. Stanley cannot say, “I hope to be a lawyer,” andlet it go at that. Stanley senses there are men in Africa, Asia, and Europe with strange names he cannot even pronounce who ¢an say or do some- thing tomorrowthat could very well determine what kind of world Stanley will live in 10 years from now. No, we had nosuch challenges. And today the job Stanley does in meeting his challenges is truly remarkable. Visiting the campuses of the country, I realize that I’m face face with the most precious possession America has today: young boys and girls. I discount the sensational thas on all sides because I know they said the same thing about the young boys and girls of the 1920s. Indeed the 1920s had become a byword for irresponsibility. Butlet us stop for a minute and think. Who are our engineers today and the electronic experts and, indeed, who were the boys who flew the Hump and fought on Guadalcanal and beat the Nazis and Fascists? Weren’t they the youths of the 1920s? And in the next generation, the men and women who will find the cures for many ofour illnesses and diseases, who will certainly explore the space around us, who will add to the intellectual development of manwill be the boys and girls of the unhappy 1960s. And I hope they will leave for their own children a much better world than we left for them. + : Family Weekly, April 2; 1967 5 |