The title, The Old Folks Home at the College, is from a song lyric. I bet you can guess, or know, the author. If you look up the phrase online I think you will find a path to some good listening.

These are strange days. Upside down times. The FBI as a savior? Twitter and Facebook as friends? Really? Overwork and boredom. Hunger and indignity. Disease and cancellations. Repression and wars. Heat, cold, floods, and avalanches. 

How would you or anyone in your workplace, neighborhood or school sincerely and militantly saying “we need a comprehensive revolution” or “I am a revolutionary” or “justice requires a fundamental revolution in all sides of life” sound to those listening? 

Quaint? Anachronistic? Sectarian? Juvenile? Laughable? 

I am seventy six in two weeks. I remember being much younger—for example in college—and the hostile feelings I then had about most older folks. 

It wasn’t their greater experience, their relative lack of energy, or anything else directly attributable to additional years that I minded. What outraged me was their dismissal of what they smirkingly called “youthful idealism and naivete.”

They didn’t address my critical views of society. They didn’t assess my hopes for something better or question my commitment to work for it. They simply waved all that aside like one might dismiss the muttering of a psychotic. “You’ll grow out of it like we did,” they intoned. “You are young and unlearned. You don’t realize that social gains can only be modest, regardless of right and wrong,” they preached. “You are melodramatic, self destructive, egocentric. You are throwing your future away,” they squeaked. My older and in their own estimate more knowledgeable critics didn’t try to add coherence, clarity, and reach to my social picture. They didn’t even address the substance. They only ridiculed my social picture to try to get me off the activist road I was on.

I also remember how my generation was going to be different than others that had preceded us. Nothing would ever disrupt our honest perception of the conditions of society. Nothing would reverse our values or our commitments. We were 1968 revolutionaries. Join us or get the hell out of our way. Seize the time. No surrender. Certainly the simple fact of getting older, year after year, wouldn’t turn us around. Not us.

Radical ideals oriented our trajectory and it would not be supplanted by the habits of compromised lives. No ticky tacky suburbia for us. No gray flannel suits for us. We would not become clowns on commission. We would never walk down ancient empty streets.

When I was twenty, like all my friends, I didn’t think youthful vim, vigor, outrage, and passion were a phase we would transcend. If these aspects of our lives receded as we advanced in years, we all told ourselves, it would not be owing to biological clocks. It would be the wear and tear of oppressive institutions. If we lost our commitment, it would not indicate increased wisdom, insight, or practicality. It would reveal that we succumbed to social battering and/or self-serving compromise. But we were confident this could not happen. Eyes in our pockets, nose on the ground? My generation? No way.

In our best moments, we agreed that transcending comfortable but unfounded fantasies would be progress. We agreed that developing a sense of timing and proportion would be progress. We agreed that developing tolerance for things we didn’t yet understand would be progress. We even agreed, at our best, that learning to empathize with though still reject the docile, defensive “maturity” we hated in our elders, once we understood the powerful pressures that caused it, would be progress.

But we also knew that becoming what we rejected would not be progress. No Pied Piper prison for us. We knew what we wanted. We would not be deterred. Truth to tell, wise and prescient as we were at the time, it seems that my generation, now a half century older, was not much better at avoiding getting turned around than the generations that preceded us. Someplace along the path most of us moved from being busy being born to being busy dying.

If you are of those days but you now look in the mirror and see someone old in spirit it may be because over the years you have understandably bent yourself to amicably survive in hostile circumstances without stubbornly constantly contesting nearly everything you encountered and suffering loneliness as a result. Or, less benignly, you may have lost your edge because you have rationalized crossing to the side of cursed money. But however understandable but forlorn or in some cases craven such transformations might have been, the truth is we were right decades back when we foresaw that if we lost our fight it would reveal collapse, not maturity.

No doubt this screed may not appear particularly relevant to most who hear it—especially to those who are many decades younger than myself—even a half century younger than myself, but I think maybe the message has merit. Don’t be liberal about this, to use a phrase from our past. Ask your older friends (or your parents—or indeed, your grand parents) who were revolutionary in their values and ideas and commitments when they were twenty but who aren’t now—ask them—can you honestly say that your current self could out reason, or hold his or her head higher, or be more proud, or is accomplishing more for others, or is more admirable, then your younger version?

I contend that what has been lost in accommodating to oppressive relations hugely outweighs what has been gained in “maturity,” especially once we realize that a sense of reality, of proportion, and a degree of tolerance and of empathy could all have been gained by my generation while maintaining our revolutionary mindset and commitments. 

We didn’t have to jettison the former to gain the latter. Indeed, without retaining the former, the latter are worth less, arguably nothing.

My generation—or the part I am addressing—was revolutionary for some very simple reasons. If those reasons were ill-conceived and if there have been no substitute reasons learned later to maintain the old stance, then, yes, I agree, we should all have mellowed. And, for that matter, others should not be taking over for us. Flailing at windmills isn’t admirable. So if that’s what it was, and what it would be, don’t bother. 

But if our reasons for being revolutionary were just and compelling a half century ago, and if since then the rise and fall of social well being has only added more reasons for revolutionary commitment, then we should still be who we were, only more so—and others, especially young folks now, should be taking over for us.

In 1968 the youthful revolutionary organization, the Weatherman, one of the worst—in my view—manifestations of the times, had a succinct chant they often intoned: Country Sucks, Kick Ass. This, I hope we can all agree, wasn’t an intellectual meal to last a lifetime. 

But for most folks who were committed then, even those in outrageously wrongheaded organizations like Weatherman, the underlying motivations and insights that led us to call ourselves revolutionary were sound. Those underlying motivations and insights were the baby that should not have been jettisoned with the bathwater.

We earlier realized, with various degrees of emphasis on this or that part of life, that we lived in a society whose defining institutions were—and still are—woefully inadequate. 

We realized that when our basic institutions worked at their absolute best and as rhetoric said they ought to, alienation, disenfranchisement, inequality, misdirection of energies, violation of earth and sky, denial of human potential, and rampant indignity were all endemic. 

And we realized that when the basic institutions all too regularly strayed from their very infrequent best attributes to far more often manifest their average attributes, or worse, the horrendous results included gargantuan poverty, rampant anti-social violence, vile racism, epidemic rape, disgusting sweat shops, mind bogglingly deadly international starvation, and crippling killing war and death squads.

Is this just a list of words? Read it, and back to phone fun? Or does it matter and require further elaboration, action?

When we were younger, the institutions we found culpable for the society’s ills were private ownership of the means of production, market competition, the patriarchal nuclear family, coercive hierarchical government, and racism and bigotry in all their forms. 

We understood that mitigating the pains of these institutions by winning immediate limited reforms was a positive short term aim. But we also understood that the ultimate goal for anyone truly concerned about human well being had to be attaining new institutions that could facilitate societal production, consumption, allocation, procreation, socialization, celebration, and administration, not just for the benefit of a few, but consistently with the most humane and just aspirations of the many.

We believed, in short, in human potential. We foresaw real people, like ourselves, one day conducting themselves socially and humanely having been born and lived in environments that didn’t preclude such choices. 

We favored finding new ways of organizing work and consumption and new ways of deciding who had a claim on what parts of the social product. We favored men and women birthing and parenting new generations without adopting roles imbuing misogynist assumptions and hierarchical attitudes. We sought a world in which humans respected their natural earthly home and were mindful caretakers of its wealth and beauty. We sought justice in allocation and in all circumstances. 

We wanted biological and cultural differences to be celebrated and wanted the celebration to reflect our ever growing knowledge of our selves and our natural environments. We thought people could behave with social conscience and mutual solidarity not due to undergoing a supernatural transformation of our natures, but by virtue of being born and prospering in respectful, dignified, enlightening and inspiring environments.

And in all this we were not utopian or wild-eyed. We were perfectly sensible. Imagine. Another world is possible. There was nothing wrong with this aspect of our reasoning fifty years ago, and there is still no evidence whatsoever to overturn its basic insights. On the contrary, we know more now than we did then about what kinds of changes are needed and about what the obstacles are to attaining them. The vile impositions of our society’s defining institutions on the motivations of elites and on the means they have to mystify, malign, and coerce the rest of us have been made repeatedly evident, arguably never more so than now. So what is the implication?

Well, it isn’t that we old folks should run around screaming “revolution now,” or “country sucks, kick ass,” obviously. But there is a considerable difference between: 

(1) having one’s head in the sand and doing nothing aimed at changing the world for the better, or

(2) working for valuable changes but with one’s focus only on the immediate reforms being sought, or

(3) working for immediate changes while focusing also on long-run solutions.

Our commitment to ultimately revolutionize all sides of life should affect how our immediate campaigns are defined, what immediate goals we seek, and how we seek those goals. It should inform what we talk about when we organize, write, speak, and teach—what ideas we try to convey, what commitments we try to elicit.

And to my eyes, I admit, these steps seem to me to be too often under represented in progressive and left activism, and in our very lives—today—and, honestly, for decades. When do campaigns around essential and worthy improvements in wages and incomes, reductions of racism, reductions of sexism, refinements of electoral structures, defense against lies and clubs, elimination of fossil fuels, and on and on, include in their ways of talking and of initiating organizations and campaigns knowledge of and desire for not just the worthy short term immediate gains being sought, but also for a new, visionary, economy, culture, kinship, and polity? Does the absence matter?

Yes, I think the absence of unifying goals, of shared long-term commitments, and of attention to communicating these forthrightly at every opportunity weakens not only our prospects of organizing usefully toward a distant end, but also our near-term efforts to reduce pain today. And now comes what I guess might be termed the punchline. My generation has an excuse—a bad one, that certainly doesn’t apply to many of our past years, but that for right now, at least, is an excuse. Tired blood. Creaking joints. Dissipating memory. Declining focus. But what about today’s youth?

Today’s activism, for want of shared clear revolutionary aims and spirit, even among the young, is still often narrowly informed and even siloed, and it rarely incorporates the kind of logic, solidarity, and morale that can sustain long-term involvement. Some may say, that’s nonsense. You are just being a negative curmudgeon.

Okay, think back ten years, or fifteen, or twenty or whatever. Think of all the events and campaigns since. Ask, are all those folks still involved? Are they all smarter, more committed, better organized, than, say, during week two of their activity?

Current movements are too often too narrow in focus, too lacking in depth of envisioned long term aims, and too limited in spiritual and moral appeal to attract wide and, even more so, lasting support. What is even more disturbing is that movements, or at least some members, sometimes even celebrate their very weaknesses, their lack of longer term vision, their lack of breath of focus, their lack of audacity and passion connected directly to the normal daily lives of working people and able to converse with such working people, as if these debits were virtues.

At the level of feeling, of emotion, and of consciousness, our projects, certainly those of my generation but also, sadly, I fear those of younger folks too, most often do little to overcome and sometimes even contribute to the main hesitancy that impedes most people today from taking a progressive stand: the belief that nothing significantly better than what current society offers is logically possible, or, even if it is conceivably logically possible, that certainly nothing significantly better than what we endure can actually be attained. The belief that there is no alternative. Cynicism.

If you happen to suffer that—and to one degree or another almost everyone does—then you are being reasonable if you intone—“why bother trying, if you accept the the mantra of docility.”

Much, hell most, hell nearly all of my generation suffers such cynicism at 70 plus years old, but even as the world and societies in it face dire and even extinction level threats, and even as constituencies suffer food, water, and dignity denials of immense magnitude, too many young nowadays seem to also suffer the docility disease. We can’t win, there is nothing to win, so why bother really trying? The view is gospel to preach for some. For others it is a fear barely uttered aloud but nonetheless eating away at hope, devouring desire.

Even in their college years this afflicts our young—creating a kind of old folks home at the college, distinguishable from the old folks home in the city center mainly by the volume of alcohol consumed and of condoms utilized—but not by activism and organizing undertaken. Sorry to say it, painful to say it, tearful to say it, but it is too true, isn’t it?

Given Trump, given racist rage, given Covid death and deprivation, given war, given their stunted life prospects, given the state of ecology, yes, many youth are in motion—but not the millions upon millions who arguably could be and certainly should be. 

We want the world and we want it now was politically naive as to immediate possibility fifty years ago when so many of us chanted it. But the underlying sentiment was right on, as we used to say. And it should be felt now, too. But what is today’s chant, sweeping campuses, sweeping high schools, sweeping the young in and out of schools?

Our projects, young and old, sometimes convey a broad and deep understanding of the systemic causes of today’s problems but I think they very rarely offer positive institutional alternatives to the status quo that can provide hope and motivation. That can sustain commitment. Because of this, from outside the left (and often from the inside it too) our efforts look like marking time and even just posturing. Our efforts appear to barely if at all address the average citizen’s deep seated cynicism—which, of course, is precisely what must be addressed to accomplish anything major and lasting.

A left worth joining in the U.S., which is where I live—and around the world in other countries, as well—should be fighting vigorously for immediate gains that can alleviate suffering and advance a degree of immediate dignity and justice, of course. 

We should be trying to now win a thirty four work week with full forty hour pay, a living-well minimum wage, full employment, real affirmative action, a comprehensive housing program, a humane universal health care program, a rich pre-school and public education program, ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms that empower disenfranchised constituencies, a non-intrusive foreign policy, workers and community rights over corporate greed, massive programs to suppress global warming and many other immediate gains one can easily think of—all in ways aiming not to win and go home, but to win and struggle on.

Beyond immediate goals we should develop and communicate not only how these and other immediate changes are each good in their own right, but also how they will each hugely gain strength when linked together as part of a process to ultimately attain a new society whose broad character we lay out in clear and concise language, and whose details we evidence and evolve by our practice.

Once one has intellectually understood even the most elementary truths about capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism, as so many in my generation did decades back—and as I suspect an even higher proportion of young folks have done currently—I don’t see how less than the above approach is honest, just, or strategic.

So what are we waiting for?

We—and now I mean my generation but also young folks in workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools—need to jettison all the timidity, defensiveness, and worry about being thought juvenile or irresponsible that has been preached since the Sixties and has even colonized our own minds and habits. We need to replace all that with bold, honest, forthright statements. 

Our country needs a most profound and broad revolution in its structures, and people of good will and clear vision need to be working for it, producing vision, strategy, and program, building alliances and creating encompassing organizations, winning immediate reforms and parlaying the immediate gains into greater power to win still more gains in a continuing trajectory of struggle, now and hereafter.

We need to know what we want. And we need to live and fight for it. All in. Not thinking we are going to win in a walk, win in a moment. But understanding how hard and how long our struggle will be, and entering it with the necessary commitment to persist.

Finally – if you hear this and you think to yourself, “where’s today?” Why isn’t this about our current moment? Why isn’t it about a battle being waged right now – then please think again. It is about our current moment.

The question to ask is almost precisely the opposite of why isn’t this entreaty focused more on now. Rather, we should ask why aren’t countless immediate struggles that are focused overwhelmingly on some near term and relatively narrow though certainly essential gain all being waged in light of overarching far larger desires and all being presented and sought in light of a trajectory of change far broader than the borders of any single struggle?

Political naiveté, immaturity, or ignorance will not fuel a reasoned pursuit of revolution. Not for the young and energetic or for the elderly and even doddering. Nor will siloed campaigns or campaigns that rightly fight for reforms but that wrongly see reforms as ends in themselves, win and go home, fuel a reasoned and sustained pursuit of fundamentally changed core institutions.

Nor will any of that offered by young or old, or even by the most seasoned, sincere, and committed activists ever to exist, reach into working class communities and inspire support from and leadership by people struggling to survive, people buried in lies, people cynical about prospects. Organizing not just mobilizing is what we need—including raising consciousness of injustice but also of goals, including exerting mobilized strength to win immediate gains but also to develop lasting movement structure and organization, all by the hard work of talking, of working together, of defining, of trusting. 

We need connections and solidarity among and even the unification of campaigns for change, of movements for change, of organizations for change, and we need practice that tirelessly reaches out from all of that to wherever in non gated communities all of that lacks support and membership in ways that respect and address what uninvolved and even hostile poor and working people feel and want.

We won’t achieve more if we don’t seek more. We won’t even achieve less if we don’t seek more. The truth is, everything above is pretty obvious. Saying it is easy. Believing it is harder. Acting on it is hardest. But no one ever said, or no one ever should have said, winning a new world would be easy. It is good enough that it is possible. And it is.

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