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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 4. 1966.

[introduction]

He Talks like a slob (pronounced "slab") and itches to give you a loud slap on the back—that's what a Yank seems like. And behind his open grin there lurks something mysterious and jealous-making. It is as if that grin is saying: "I am rich; I am strong: I come from the Big Time."

Then What is a little Yank like, a student Yank? He is not so easy to describe. Or perhaps one is readier to realise that he knows very little about him, aside from the occasional American he may run across at varsity, or the report of a returned American Field Scholar.

Jonathan Fox is a Harvard graduate currently in New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship.

In the fifties and early sixties, they called young Americans the "apathetic generation." It seemed evident, even to the most sophisticated observers, that the war-baby crop had grown up the sad but inevitable products of an over-affluent society. Since these youths had never known want, their innards lacked the stuff of vitality—so the critics said.

But the critics—themselves belonging to earlier generations—were not quite right.

It was a spokesman for the last "carefree" generation in America, the Roaring Twenties, who wrote: "Teach us to care, and not to care. Teach us to sit still."

Had there been an equal spokesman for the war-babies as they were coming of age, he might have delivered this exhortation: "Give us a cause, and a way, and our fire shall light the land."

Robbed of direct solutions to the problems they were to inherit, post war Americans grew up struggling silently with a pent-up passion.

Today, all know that the term, "apathetic" was a misnomer. In the past two years. American students have marched on Washington for Negro rights, and they have marched on the Capitol to protest the war in Vietnam.

They have marched and demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands throughout the United States.

They have inflicted upon a leading university a blow so staggering that it will take many years for the Berkeley educational machine to recapture its original momentum. And they have made their power felt in a score of additional schools across America.