It's a line from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Chicago."
Written after the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, et al, it was a kind of anthem for my generation. I had just graduated from college and was in my first job (doing PR for a financial company that preserved the wealth of rich people--consider that irony), my wife and I were living in Cambridge MA, I had spent weeks in the spring stumping for Gene McCarthy who helped knock LBJ out of the race, and the year had seen the assinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy who would probably have been a shoo-in for the 68 election. We ended up with Richard Nixon and that household name, Spiro Agnew. Both men would later resign their offices in disgrace.
A year later was Woodstock. My wife and I were expecting our second so there was no way we would go, but I'd spent some weekends traveling to conferences of people who were examining communal living. Early the next year I made a stop at Kent State after one conference, two weeks before the shootings. The unrest that would result in them was well underway.
We helped set up a commune in the fall of 1969 and lived in it for a year. There were three or four other constants but for the most part we ended up feeling like house parents to a revolving cast of students and nomads. Had a couple of pretty intense parties though. The next year we left for "Going Up the Country" (yep, "Canned Heat") and a job in the human services.
Probably the only thing it all changed was my life and the lives of my wife and children. The water did not taste like wine.
I'm teaching now, part time and online. My students are earnest twenties and thirties somethings working on a graduate MBA in Human Resources. What I notice most about them is the effort they put into managing their world. They try to condition how their worlds respond to them. They do it with me when I try to get them to evaluate each other and give feedback by making their response an effort to influence how I will evaluate them.
It isn't a selfish, me-me sort of thing. It's more like a prevent defense. "How can I survive and make my outcomes more to my liking?" What it isn't is some investment in making a difference out in the world. Well I guess that didn't work so well for us, so why should they throw more effort down that hole. I can understand that.
At the same time I recently took a course on Nonprofit Management and found a room full of people of mostly that age--there were a half dozen fogeys like me--who were engaged. They were frustrated with a perception they were condemning themselves to low income careers, but they were engaged. We did a project with a local community group that offers opportunities for people of that age group to do projects in the community and to be trained in doing board work for nonprofits.
So it's not all bleak. It's different.
But I do sometimes want to say to my students that they should not expect to be able to manage their worlds--that ultimately the choice will be about simply responding to it in the best way they can and knowing that while they can't make it the way they want it to be, they can find a place in it.
Other than that, Sisyphus, how are things rollin'?
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