humansofnewyork:“We felt like there was a big change that was going to happen. I was a student at B
humansofnewyork:“We felt like there was a big change that was going to happen. I was a student at Berkeley. It was 1968. All of us thought: if only people could just sing and dance, and not get so caught up in the idea of being an ‘organization man.’ We had plenty of brilliant theoreticians to buoy our point of view. They gave us tools to talk about our ideas. But there was an arrogance there too. We really thought we were going to enlighten those poor suckers, the older generation who went to the office everyday, and didn’t understand the world. We were going to fix them. We were going to save America from it’s greed. But greed was never an American condition. It’s a human condition. This ‘give me,’ this grasping. You see it in babies. You see it in old people. It’s who we are. It’s us. You can moderate it, but you’ll never fix it. And a lot of us ‘sixties kids’ got depressed when we finally realized this. We turned to drinking and smoking dope. I started down that path myself, until I found a wonderful job working with senior citizens in Pennsylvania. These were railway workers, conservatives, people I’d always seen as part of the problem. But they were absolute sweethearts. I loved spending time with them. That job is what saved me. As a student, I’d only understood ‘work’ as part of a theoretical framework. Something society forced upon the underclass. But work is what gave me purpose. It connected me with people. It freed me from theory.” -- source link