The Greening of America

Excerpts from: The Greening of America, by Charles A. Reich, Random House, 1970

     America is dealing death.  Not only to people in other lands, but also to its own people.  So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.  This realization is not limited to the new generation.  Talk to a retired schoolteacher in Mendocino, a judge in Washington, D.C., a housewife in Washington, Pennsylvania, a dude rancher in the Washington Cascades.  We think of ourselves as an incredibly rich country, but we are beginning to realize that we are also a desperately poor country—poor in most of the things that throughout the history of mankind have been cherished as riches.
     There is a revolution coming.  It will not be like revolutions of the past.  It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.  It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence.  It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence.  It promises a higher reason, a more humane community, and a new, liberated individual.  Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to women, to society, to nature, and to the land.
     This is the revolution of the new generation.  Their protest and rebellion, their culture, music, ways of thought and liberated lifestyle are not a passing fad or just a form of dissent and refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational.  The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell-bottoms to the Woodstock Festival, makes sense and is part of a consistent philosophy.  This revolution is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America.
     The logic and necessity of the new generation—and what they are so furiously opposed to—must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America.  It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American Dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960’s, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man.  Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing ‘reason’---reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary.  Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values, and a new culture can restore control.
     We have all known the loneliness, the emptiness, the plastic isolation of contemporary America.  We have been dulled and blinded to the injustice and ugliness of slums.  We have all been persuaded that giant organizations are necessary.  We have all been induced to give up our dreams of adventure and romance in favor of the escalator of success, but the new consciousness says that the escalator is a sham and the dream is real.  And these things, buried, hidden, and disowned in so many of us, are shouted out loud, believed in. and affirmed by a growing multitude of young people who seem too healthy, intelligent, and alive to be wholly insane…who appear, in their collective strength, capable of making the revolution happen.
     For one almost convinced that it was necessary to accept ugliness and evil…that it was necessary to be a miser of dreams…it is an invitation to cry or laugh.  For one who thought the world was encased in metal and plastic and sterile stone…it seems a veritable greening of America.         Charles Reich, 1970