Youth: A rememberance of idealism past

This article is adapted from a speech given at the Catholic Youth Convention in El Paso, Texas, last October 24. It was entered in the April 21 Congressional Record by Sen. George S. McGovern (D.S.D.).

I'm really glad to be here today. Back home it's cold and probably raining... Boston's a lot different from El Paso. The architecture is different, the way people talk is different, the whole pace of life is different. But there are a lot of things that unite El Paso and Boston; Texas and Massachusetts and the Southwest and the Northeast. We're both part of one nation, a nation that's in trouble.

We've just come out of a war that did no good for anybody. It killed more people than a mind can imagine, over 40,000 of them Americans. Even those that defended it then can find no joy in its memory now.

It has not, as you know, been a stable year for any of us. And with good reason. In Boston as in El Paso, 4% of the population has $60,000 per year while the other 96% cling tenuously to whatever modest, constantly shrinking income they can manage. One-third of the country is at the poverty line or below. Another one-half, more than one-half, is made up of people who are doing the work that makes this the country is called the richest in the world. And yet who could say that, that many are appreciated with an appropriate and just due?

They are working in factories, in stores and offices. They are planting our crops and harvesting them. They are teaching our children carrying our mail, driving our trucks. They are running our railroads, bottling our beer, paving our roads. They are keeping the rhythm of this country going.

In return for this, many of them live in fear of joblessness. In return for this, salaries, for some once reasonably adequate, are becoming less and less and less so by inflation, a "public enemy" no one seems able to shoot down. In return for this, an American working family can be destroyed, penalized for years by the sickness of one of its members: a child becomes ill and the parents have to face thousands of dollars worth of medical expense, when at best they can meet the cost of their groceries. What can the consequences be? Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

For do we provide justice for our own? We write tax laws which permit these conditions to exist, which invite their persistence. It's not only a matter of taxes being levied relatively heavily on working people-though it is hard. But the rich can jump through loopholes like trained acrobats, a businessman can go to the plushest restaurant in El Paso with a friend and after three courses and two drinks apiece write the whole thing off as tax deductible. Well that's great for him, his friend and the Alka-Seltzer people.

But when an ordinary working man takes time off from his job to take his child to a clinic for medical treatment, and decides to have lunch with that child in a cafeteria, there is no free lunch, and no tax deduction. All there is, is several hours of lost pay and a bill for the treatment.

The Declaration of Independence states that as far as America is concerned, all men are created equal. Well we may all be created equal, but something seems to happen a little while after that when we find out our economic status. Today many of the more privileged youth of this country, think only of consolidating their next eggs while millions of other young people worry about whether they'll find a job. Lincoln said that this nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free, and that goes for the economically enslaved in America today as well. This nation must endure, and it is our duty, the young people's duty, to see that it does.

Among many young people in Appalachia, among Indian youth, Blacks and Spanish speaking youth the unemployment statistics are grim. Unemployment among all young people ranges from 30%-50% in America today as the young men and women of this country are faced with the near certainly of joblessness, or at best intermittent jobs, often of the most marginal kind. What has happened to the youthful idealism of the 1960's? My father noted in 1967 that: "Not since the founding of the Republic-when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at 32, Henry Knox built the artillery corps at 26, Alexander Hamilton joined the independence fight at 19, and Rutiedge and Lynch signed the Declaration of South Carolina at 27-has there been a younger generation of Americans brighter, better educated, more highly motivated than this one. In the Peace Corps, in the Northern Student Movement, in Appalacia, on dusty roads in Mississippi, and narrow trails in the Andes, this generation of young people has shown an idealism and a devotion to country matched in few nations and excelled in none."

Where is that idealism now? In recent years we have been told not to worry about others but to secure ourselves, feather our own caps in whatever way we can. True, some politicians talk about sacrifice-but what we call sacrifice are efforts to win a war or beat inflation. Where are the sacrifices we must make so that there can be some justice in the lives of those who have never known it?

We find on the government level, our greatest welfare recipients are great industries which receive millions and more millions of dollars of support, and yet-if unemployed workers and their children are given some aid, and if some of us urge medical insurance for all Americans then one hears about the evils of government spending and talk of Socialism.

One hears that we must maintain a huge and powerful military in order to defend the free world. I agree. I only wonder about the company we keep in this free world. Does it include Franco? President Park of South Korea? President Thieu? The military junta in Chile? Or Brazil? Does it include the recent military leaders of Greece to whom we gave millions of dollars in military aid?

Money can be the greatest gift or the most terrible weapon in this society. The money that we gave to support these governments could have helped feed and school hungry children here at home and in other countries. It might have gone to inadequately staffed and supplied hospitals and schools or to those parts of the country where people receive virtually no medical care at all.

There is something tragic, in the truest sense of the word, about our sense of what is important, about what really matters.

Our leaders talk to us mechanically, showing fine self-preservation instincts. They seem to be milling in the dark, clinging to tarnished phrases from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without seeming to realize that both of these documents were the response of courageous and indignant men who were furious at the injustice and the oppression they saw and experienced.

That fury of idealism, those passions seem to be missing from American political life today. We as a country are lucky, for we still have options, just as Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had options. They were wealthy men who might have ducked the affair. But they moved to the only side they felt they could move to; the side of the persecuted. They chose to stand against the powerful, the rich and the unjust.

Today, our generation must take a stance and stand united-those who feel the pains of oppression as well as those who, because of a privileged position in this society, only see the oppression from afar. We must come together as a generation, come together to struggle against injustice and oppression, struggle together in a way which will mark a regeneration of the principles on which this country was formed. I hope that the young people who come together in such a struggle will be as various and diverse as our country is. Our legacy is too broad and too rich for any to believe that it doesn't belong to all of us. As long as we act the part of the living and hold it sacred by our deeds, it will not escape us. We must get together-poor and vulnerable black tenant farmers, Spanish speaking regnant youth, the young people of Appalachia, a region so long plundered of its wealth, wealth which has been stripped from the ground and carried elsewhere leaving those who did the work very little in return.

And in addition Indian youth and young native Alaskans are among the working youth of this country, the millions of men and women who are destined to give a half-country of their lives in labor to this nation, and who deserve more than they are now getting. Also the well-to-do and privileged youth of this country, so many of whom have their own troubles and fears and confusions. Whereas millions their age have virtually nothing they have everything-it seems, except a sense of who they really are and what they believe in. There are many young people in this country who are searching for ways to position themselves alongside those less fortunate.

They are the privileged in many ways, but the deprived in others. They have more, but they feel. I suspect, at loose ends. They are troubled by their own youthful sense of injustice, their Christian sense that it is simply not fair, or to use an expression that my father often used:

"It is not acceptable that a nation as rich as this, or as powerful as this continues to have so many serious social and economic injustices or inequalities."

And in the larger context of the world, those same young people, themselves so well off, may also sense how precarious their situation could be historically. After all, we as a nation make up 5% of the population of the earth, yet we consume 40% of its raw materials, and we are its wealthiest nation.

How long can such a state of affairs continue? How long can we keep ourselves insulated from the crying needs of people elsewhere as well as those right here among us?

The history of social struggle is a long one-I have already referred to the revolutionary origins of American society. But long before this country was founded, men and women fought against various tyrants and exploders and the same exploiters clothed themselves in sweet sounding pieties and talk of their rights and their privileges, as if they were somehow beyond question. And always those who dare to question or criticize the status quo are called bad names or ostracized or hunted down as criminals. The story is an old one and it goes back to the dawn of history.

Almost two thousand years ago there lived a man who risked everything, and ultimately his life because he was willing to defy power and principalities to defy the rich and powerful men and their military supporters who ran one of the world's earlier empires.

This man who risked all, loved the poor, tried to feed them and heal them and speak for them and work on their behalf and consule them and ultimately agitate against the wrong he knew afflicted them. He walked for long stretches, preaching, one might even say today, organizing. He was not afraid to condemn those he knew were wrong, however powerful or privileged they were. He allowed Himself anger and that judicious indignation that distinguishes mere observers, however well intentioned, from social and political activists who want to change the world as well as study it. His name was Jesus Christ. I would think one of the most significant moments in his life was when he appeared outraged in the temple at the excesses of the money lenders.

Somehow we who are young and live in this nation, 2000 years later must find a mixture of Christ's compassion and understanding, but also his clean anger, his willingness to commit his energies in a struggle on behalf of the downtrodden of this world.

"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed," Thomas Jefferson wrote. Our commitments must be to action, and we cannot expect it to be easy action. It will take all our energy, all our compassion, all our strength. We will need determination and faith, for truly it is our mission on earth, Without those, we are lost, but with them the big payoff and final reward will dwarf the millions that the selfish have hoarded and heal the divisiveness and the wounds already seared. It is our duty together, and together we must begin. For as my father quoted Albert Camus:

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. '76 is a junior affiliated with Winthrop House.