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DOTSON RADER
if they turn to that,") and what has replaced it is a fanatically nona.c–
quisitive communalism, touched with anarchy, which has contempt (an
attitude the young are good at) for the rat race mentality of their par–
ents. The high school young I met believe that very little in nature is
expendable, certainly not the lives of the innocent. They have little con–
sciousness of territorial rights, ownership. Economically and socially they
are noncompetitive and, curiously, culturally intolerant.
I am reminded of a high school commune in an apartment in the
eighties in Manhattan, one of a score of communes in the New York
environs, where for nearly a year twenty-odd high school drop-outs
have lived communalistically. When you ask them what they'll be doing
in a few years, deprived of degrees and marketable skills, they answer
that there will be many more communes, thousands of them, where they
can live and play. And for those who have come to the Movement
from an apolitical, subcultural route, their opposition to the ·System is
based, not so much on the war and the racism, but on a hatred of
capitalism. Capitalism, they suggest, can never tolerate widespread non–
conformity. It requires a working class - youth - programed by its
schools to do its work, and to believe that that work is meaningful. In
the long run they believe that unless the government is overthrown,
their communes, ·and their life style along with them, will be crushed.
One of the most surprising elements, to me, in the character of the
high school radicals is the nature of their sexuality. When I was in high
school, nearly a decade ago, we considered ourselves rebels in the tradi–
tion of James Dean and Brando, and our rebellion took much of its
expression
in
our music (rock 'n' roll- Jerry Lee Lewis, The Big
Bopper, the Everly Brothers, etc.) and subsequently in our strutting, un–
furled promiscuity. One established his manhood by balling as many
chicks as possible in the shortest amount of time with the maximum
level of public (peer group) notice. The big parental worry was the
promiscuity of the young. Parents saw our rock 'n' roll and our souped–
up cars as threatening because they
were
sexual. Our rebellion was
primarily sexual
in
character.
The present high school radicals don't seem to posit their man–
hood (adulthood) primarily through sex. I think one reason may be
the Pill, another that, partly because of the Pill, sex comes earlier by
several years than it did for us and another that politics are now the
central avenues of rebellion.
If
you are a youth you prove your man–
hood by standing up to the pigs, not by numbering your fornications
on the locker room walls. Significantly, the girls share this change in
attitude toward sex (that is, sex has become again a function, a private
