420
MARSHALL BERMAN
stead of a vicious outlaw, he would want to
be
the firmest pillar of
a good society."
I remember an SDS meeting at the New York Community
Church on a sweltering July night in 1966. A black man spoke, from
SNCC I think, and told us - as MalcQ1m X had been telling us for
a year or so before he was killed - that there was an important role
for white radicals in "the Revolution," but that
this
role wasn't in
the black
ghett~:
what we needed to do, he said, was to go back
home, wherever we came from, and "work with our own kind." The
white radicals in the audience didn't take this very well. One of the
ablest and most courageous I know, a community organizer in
Newark, said: "So you're telling us to go back to our parents?" In
effect, said the SNCC man, yes. "But I have more in common with
oppressed blacks in the ghetto than I have with my parents in Scars–
dale. I have more in common with sharecroppers in Georgia, In–
dians on the reservation, Bolivian tin miners, Vietnamese - for
Christ's sake, I have more in common with
anybody
than with my
parents! That's why I'm in the movement in the first place." Most
of us agreed. But the man from SNCC persisted: we had more in
common with our parents than we liked to think.
For a great many of us there could be no greater insult. But
the truth is that there are some very deep impulses which we and
our parents share; impulses which are frighteningly ambiguous, but
which are in themselves nothing to
be
ashamed of; impulses which
have radical possibilities for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters
alike. They are what Rousseau called
perfectibility
and - in its
most distinctively modem expression -
avidity.
Perfectibility: the
unwillingness to settle back and rest content, the need to change con–
stantly one's life for the better. Avidity: the desire to turn thought
into action, to
do it,
here and now. It
is
perfectibility and avidity
that lead our parents, in Scarsdale or wherever they are stuck, to
trade in their car for a new one every year. How to judge them?
Is it absurd to think that a new car
will
make them happy? Of
course, this
is
precisely the sort of absurdity that makes the Ameri–
can economy and our middle-class life run. But it is not at all absurd
for our parents to feel that their old car and all the other things
they have now do not make them happy. Indeed, it
is
the beginning
