To An Angry Young Man

I HAVE BEEN GETTING lusty cheers and jeers for a rueful little paragraph I recently wrote about student riots. The most eloquent (and savage) letter ended: "Drop dead!!!" Another diatribe was signed "Columbia Senior." I wish I knew where to send this reply to both: Dear?:

It will upset you to learn that I agree with many things you said. For instance: "Don't question our sincerity!: I don't. You are about as sincere as anyone can be. You are about as sincere as anyone can be. You are sincerely unhappy, sincerely frustrated and sincerely confused. You are also sincerely wrong about the few facts you cite, and sincerely illogical in the violent conclusions you reach. Besides, what does "sincerity" have to do with issues? Any insane asylum is full of sincere patients. Hitler was undoubtedly sincere. So are the followers of Voliva, who think the world is sincerely flat.

I sadly agree that your college courses have been "outrageously irrelevant to the times"--because your letter reveals that you could not pass a freshman exam in at least three fields in which you pass such sweeping judgments: economics, history, political theory.

You say, "Destroy a system that has not abolished unemployment, exploitation and war!" By the same reasoning, you should blow up all hospitals (and perhaps execute all doctors, biologists and researchers): they have not abolished disease.

Before you destroy a system, propose another that will solve (not hide, shift or disguise) unemployment, "exploitation," war. Anyone can promise Utopia--without specifying a program. Tom Hayden, idol of the New Left, has said: "First we'll make the revolution--then we'll find out what for." Would you employ a plumber who rips out all the pipes in your house before he learned how to repair a leak?

You say, "The mass media are not telling us the truth." Then how and from whom did you learn the "evils" you correctly deplore? After all, your information comes from one or another organ of--the mass media.

"This society is only interested in higher prices and profits!: You apparently do not understand this society, or a society, or the function of prices (and profits) in any economy. Has it never occurred to you that the marketplace is a polling booth? That buying is voting? That no economic system is possible without some form of pricing, without some measure of efficacy or worth? Has it never occurred to you that profits are a form of proof (that something gives satisfaction to those who pay for it)? Perhaps you should examine the public uses that we make of private profits--through taxation.

The countries that follow your platitude, "production for use," without exception produce far less for their people to enjoy, of much shoddier quality, at much higher prices (measured by the hours of work needed to buy something). Don't you know that "Socialist" countries are smuggling "capitalist" incentives into their systems? Has it not dawned on you that whenever and whenever there is no free market, there is no free thought, no free art, no free politics, no free life?

You rage against "a heartless country in which the poor get poorer." Alas, poor Yoricks: The decline of poverty in the U.S. is among the more astonishing and hopeful facts of human history. (In 1900, about 90% of our population was poor; in 1920--50%; in 90% 1930--34%; in 1968-15%). You will cry that 15% is outrageous. Agreed. The question is: How best abolish it? (A negative income tax makes more sense than anything your colleagues propose.)

"The middle class exploits the unemployed." Please examine that cliche. Would the middle class be worse off or better off if all the unemployed magically disappeared? Obviously, much better off: Think of the enormous savings in taxes, the enormous improvement in public services, the enormous benefits from refocused energies now used to ameliorate poverty's abominable toll.

You say your generation "wants to be understood." Well, so does mine. How much have you tried to understand others? You pillory us for in-justices not of our making, frictions not of our choice, dilemmas that history (or our forebears or the sheer intractability of events) presented to us. You say we "failed" because you face so many awful problems. Will you then accept blame for all the problems that exits (and they will) when you are 20 years older? And how do you know that all problems are soluble? Or soluble swiftly? Or soluble peacefully? Or soluble, given the never-infinite resources, brains and experience any generation is endowed with?

I say that you are failing us--in failing to learn and respect discomforting facts; in failing to learn how to think (it is easier to complain); in using violence to shut down colleges; in shamefully denying that freedom of others to study and to teach; in barbarously slandering and abusing and shouting down those who disagree with you; in looting, stealing and defiling; in failing to see how much more complicated social problems are than you blindly assume; in acting out of an ignorance for which idealism is no excuse, and a hysteria for which youth is no defense. "Understanding"? You don't even understand that when you call me a "mother----" you are projecting your unresolved incestuous wishes onto me. The technical name for such projection, in advanced form, is paranoia.

Again and again, you say, "the American people want" or "demand" or "insist." How do you know? Every poll I have seen puts your position in a minority. You just say, "the American people demand"--then add whatever you prefer. This is intellectually sloppy at best, and corrupt at worst.

You want to "wreck this slow, inefficient democratic system." It took the human race centuries of thought and pain and suffering and hard experiment to devise it. Democracy is not a "state" but a process; it is a way of solving human problems, a way of hobbling power, a way of protecting every minority from the awful, fatal tyranny of either the few of the many.

Whatever its imperfections, democracy is the only system man has discovered that makes possible change without violence. Do you really prefer bloodshed to debate? Quick dictates to slow law? This democracy made possible a great revolution in the past 35 years (a profound transfer of power, a distribution of wealth, an improvement of living and health) without "liquidating" millions, without suppressing free speech, without the obscenities of dogma enforced by terror.

This "slow, inefficient" system protects people like me against people like you; and (though you don't realize it) protects innocents like you against those "reactionary...fascist forces" you fear: They, like you, prefer "action to talk." As for "security"--at what price? The most "secure" of human institutions is a prison; would you choose to live in one?

You want "a society in which the young speak their minds against the Establishment." Where have the young more freely, recklessly and intransigently attacked "the Establishment"? (Every political order has one.) Wherever "our heroes--Marx, Mao, Che" have prevailed, students, writers, teachers, scientists have been punished with hard labor or death--for what? For their opinions. Where but in "fake democracies" are mass demonstrations possible, or your bitter (and legitimate) dissent televised?

You rail against "leaders crazed with power," who "deceive the people." Your leaders are self-dramatizers who demand that power, which would craze them, and they deceive you in not telling you how they plan your "confrontations"--to force the police to use force, whose excesses I hate more than you do. I, unlike you, want no one put "up against the wall." No "cheap politician more cynically deceived you than fanatical militants did--and will. Your support feeds their neurotic (because extremist) needs. Washington's "'Non-Violent' Co-ordinating Committee" has engaged in gunfire for three days as I write this.

You say Marcuse "show that capitalist freedom actually enslaved." (He doesn't "show"--he only say.) He certainly does not sound enslaved. And does mouthing fragments for 19th-century ideology (Marx, Bakunin) really liberate? And in not Marcuse 40 years "older that 30," your cutoff on credibility? Incidentally, would you trust your life to a surgeon under 30--who never finished medical school?

Your irrationality makes me wonder how you were ever admitted into Columbia. You confuse rhetoric with reasoning. Assertions are not facts. Passion is no substitute for knowledge. Slogans are not solutions. Your idealism takes no brains. And when you dismiss our differences with contempt, you become contemptible. Very sincerely yours,   LEO ROSTEN

P.S. Please don't take any more courses in sociology, which seduces the immature into thinking they understand a problem if they discuss it in polysyllables. Jargon is not insight. Vocabulary is the opiate of radicals.