Tom Fels: An Open Letter to Barack Obama
|
Tweet this story! Support our efforts for a sustainable world.
|
|
In this “Open Letter to Barack Obama,” Tom Fels, author of Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond, urges the junior Senator from Illinois to look more closely at the new “silent majority”—the Baby Boomers—for social leadership and support.
Like Bill Gates, many Boomers are creating “second careers” for themselves—socially relevant entrepreneurship that reactivates and taps the energy of the Sixties Generation.
Hi Senator.
During the past year you were quoted several times as stating with some exasperation that we are still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
To those of us who participated in that era of change, these remarks are unsettling.
I can see that you have a point. We are indeed still fighting many of the same battles of the sixties. Why this should be so remains a good question. But a more important question, perhaps, it this: How might the veterans of that era, like latter day Holden Caulfields or graying Ben Braddocks of The Graduate, come to be more effective in our role on the battlefield?
A late July column in the New York Times addressed these thoughts. In “Geezers Doing Good” Nicholas Kristof pointed out some of the benefits of activating the latent energy of the sixties generation. Beginning with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, he cited the fashion for an “encore career” among America’s nearly 80 million baby boomers, new work that strives for satisfaction through social relevance and the return to society of a measure of its benefits. Other examples included a retired Nobel laureate working to eradicate malaria and a British management consultant who has organized thousands of participants to help alleviate suffering and disease.
Even a glance at the generation of the 1960s reveals a number of such instances, among them Dean’s Beans, the successful Massachusetts organic coffee roaster whose work includes promoting fair trade practices and social justice; Partners in Health, founded by Harvard University’s Paul Farmer, which has amassed a long record assisting in health care for the poor; California’s Commonweal, admired and portrayed by Bill Moyers, devoted to innovative approaches to health and the environment; Air America host Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance; Washington’s World Resources Institute, and many others. The current poster child for the encore career is baby boomer Al Gore.
Like a phalanx of latter day Albert Schweitzers, a number of the generation of the 1960s have found their way into or back into work that is socially significant. Yet, this devoted group makes up only a small percentage of the potential of the entire generation. Given their altruistic propensities in combination with these apparently low numbers, the sixties generation would seem to constitute the sleeping giant of current American politics and social action. Ironically, baby boomers are the “silent majority” of this new time, exactly the opposite of the noisy contingent they consituted in their youth. I would call them the elephant in the room: If activated, this throng of change-oriented citizens might help to construct the sort of positive new framework encouraged by political theorist George Lakoff–an elephant of which we could finally be proud to think.
