Youth Needs Truth

Let’s return to a brief further look at the recent Harvard Square riot, as a fair sample of a great many like it. And to a few blunt comments about today’s youth, before we come to some happier observations on the same subject.

(1) Of the six thousand participants in that Cambridge melee it is almost certain that there were not half a dozen who had an honest grievance against “society,” against Harvard University, or against anybody else. Except for the relatively few Communist agents scattered around among them, they were all just brainwashed tools of a conspiratorial force.

(2) A vast majority of the six thousand were students. For most of them are sophomores by disposition, regardless of their class. Etymologically, the word means “wise fools” or “foolish wise ones.” Not without reason has it been applied to the college breed for many centuries. And today, more than ever before — because they have been encouraged by pro-Communist professors to ridicule all authority and all tradition – the average college youngster feels himself equal to Benjamin Jowett, and is quite certain that

Whatever is knowledge I know it, And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

(3) So college students have long since become a primary target of Communist deception and agitation. This is because they are gullible; they are almost totally ignorant of either the cost or the value of their inheritance; they are endowed with the strength and energy of youth; they are brash; and they are numerous. There are literally millions of these prospective suckers today, most of them just gasping like fish in their hurry to be caught on the Communist propaganda line. And the destruction of both their character and their common sense is itself an important objective of Communist strategy.

(4) What even many careful observers of this development do not realize, however, is that youth is only the intermediate target in connection with another major Communist objective. For these young people, once captured, can be turned into a terribly destructive weapon. And the real target, against which the weapon is to be used in every practicable way, is the American middle class. This ultimate target especially includes the “lower middle class” and what the Communists have always scornfully called the bourgeoisie. For there, of course, is where lies the great solid strength of our country, which the Communists simply must destroy if they are to prevail.

(5) Unfortunately, the chief blame for the actions and the idiocies of the college youth of today can be placed squarely on their parents. (Including even a few heartbroken but dedicated members of The John Birch Society.) For these parents think, very naturally, about and towards their children, with their emotions instead of with their brains. They go right on sending Junior to college, and supplying him spending money to use for everything from buying “pot” to supporting the SDS, because they are blinded by their own softness.

(6) And the time has come for all parents, who have any character and common sense themselves, to start doing something drastic about the situation which they have allowed to develop. On April 10 the “Yippie” Jerry Rubin, a convicted member of the so-called “Chicago 7,” told more than 1500 students at Kent State University in Ohio, to burn their books, kill their parents, and burn down the suburbs. “Quit being students,” he urged. “Become criminals. We have to disrupt every institution and break every law.” While he was speaking a dozen students were circulating through the audience, collecting money in paper buckets to be turned over to Rubin in support of his activities. They received enough to fill two airplane flight bags, which Rubin took with him. A few nights earlier this same convicted conspirator, spouting the same line at the University of Utah, received several standing ovations from the two thousand students in attendance. And there are not a hundred colleges out of the more than two thousand in America where this dirty and contemptible animal would not have received an equally excited and favorable response.

(7) And we have some very good advice for all parents whose children’s morals, sanity, and lives are now being ruined by the mental pollution on our campuses. It is succinct, and to the point: “Straighten ’em out, or take ’em out!” And we do not need to elaborate, because that says it all.

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And now we turn to the bright side. Which begins with the recognition that youth is naturally idealistic. The dirtiest hippies were first enticed down the road to such childish exhibitionism by appeals to their finest instincts. Just suppose that the whole present vast horde of youthful revolutionaries had all been given the same amount of continuous attention, guidance, and inspiration by good people as has been exerted on them so patiently by the agents of an evil conspiracy. Most of them would have become determined builders of a better world, instead of deliberate destroyers of all that is best in the world we already have.

Today that truth is being manifested most happily in the Youth Chapters of The John Birch Society. The number of these chapters is still comparatively small. But more are coming into existence all over the country. And they are seldom idle. These groups engage, usually under the guidance of a good Section Leader, in conducting study clubs; in “rallies for decency”; in “police appreciation” weeks; in drives for signatures on our aid-and-trade petitions; in many local implementations of our major projects. In their joyous and confident labors for less government, more responsibility, and – with God’s help – a better world, our Youth Chapters have a direct impact of steadily increasing value.

Of even greater importance, however, is their indirect influence through the example they offer to young and old alike in their respective regions or communities. The good manners’ good morals, clean-cut appearance, energy, enthusiasm and dedication of these youngsters supply inspiration and encouragement to everybody with whom they come in contact. They provide living proof that dirt, drugs, indecency and immorality are neither signs of superiority nor prerequisites to the pride and glory of being young. They make it very obvious that the road to personal happiness does not lie through descent to the spiritual level of derelicts, or to the intellectual and physical level of the lower animals, but through maintenance of the best standards of a hard-earned civilization. Each Youth Chapter is a candle, casting its beams very effectively amid the darkness of bestiality all around it. Let’s all of us help to light more and more such candles.