Word: americans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...American romantics of the '60s shared with their forerunners a vision of profound, if unspecific change that would regenerate mankind. In urging the abolition of the common law in England and the repudiation of the national debt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, according to Historian Crane Brinton, "saw nothing between himself and his dream." A poetic-minded radical of the '60s, Carl Oglesby, described the comparable Utopian stance of today's revolutionary: "Perhaps he has no choice and he is pure fatality: perhaps there is no fatality and he is pure will. His position may be invincible, absurd, both...
Many adult Americans were shocked by the most obvious manifestations of the new romanticism-nudity, casual sex, obscenity, absurd dress, confrontation tactics. These were, of course, intended to shock. In describing some of his wilder contemporaries, Françoise René de Châteaubriand might have been talking about Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin when they confronted a House Un-American Activities subcommittee: "They rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear frightful mustaches; one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world." The heroes upon whom the romantics model...
...understand and to an extent gratify the romantics' cry for meaning. How the American romantics meet their inevitable frustrations, how they channel their remarkable energy will be a crucial event of the 1970s...
There is a fifty-fifty chance, says Futurist Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute, that working hours will be markedly shorter. Eventually, the American employee will have the option of deciding whether he wants his increased income in money or in greater leisure time. The goal of most Americans will be self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice. In everything, the emphasis will be on experimentation. "The idea of redesigning a way of life is going to be the dominant theme of the '70s," says Behaviorist B. F. Skinner. Young people will continue to fear large institutions, he believes...
Perhaps the most encouraging fact, in the long run, is that the American political system has always proved remarkably adaptive. What has seemed radical to one generation has been mulled over and adopted...