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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 4, 1986
PAGE 9
Yes, the students have indeed discovered the campus crusade of the '80s.
One such student is Amy Carter, 18-year-old daughter of the former
president, an anti-apartheid activist and frequent arrestee at Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island. On the West Coast, the issue is
extremely volatile at (where else?} the University of Calif9rnia,
Berkeley (or Berserkley, as some of its older frustrated alumni call it).
Last week, Berkeley experienced its most violent confrontation since the
anti-Vietnam war days of the 1960s as 120 campus and local police battled
with anti-apartheid demonstrators. This latest campus cause celebre drew
the attention of a Washington-based writer for the South African
newspaper BUSINESS DAY, who wrote on March 7:
Up and down the liberal establishment's east coast (that is�
.
say, from Pennsylvania to Maine--Maryland and points south
don't qualify) the children of the well-to-do are taking time
out•••to erect symbolic shantytowns on their college lawns and
otherwise bully their elders into divesting themselves of stock
in firms that do business with SA. Indeed, there seems to be
no corner of this region• s academic groves that has not been
-decorated with a plastic and cardboard sculpture in the manner
of Crossroads. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
has one--and a disappointing structure it is, too. You would
have thought MIT could at least have made its offering
geodesic.
The builders mean well, of course, and it must be tremendously
morale-boosting to be able to spend a winter night camped out
in the snow feeling solidarity for the victims of apartheid.
The class of '86 may have no draft cards to burn, poor souls,
but at least they will be able to tell their children they
stood for something before heading off to Wall Street and the
executive offices of Dow Chemical Corp.
Twenty years from now, it is unlikely that their children will
feel any the less proud or envious of their parents when they
consider the SA those parents helped create. After all, the
present generation draws no link between its own parents'
opposition to the Vietnam war and the totalitarian wasteland
that is now Vietnam.... Such is the arrogance of the well
intentioned American liberal, especially� his larval stage.
!!!
_£!!! never _!!! the damage he wreaks, albeit tangentially,
because he is !.2 utterly convinced of his 2!!n self-worth. � e,
in the words of that grotesquely smug, self-serving song, is
the world••••
In Berkeley and elsewhere, a good number of those arrested include non :iJ ,;
student •professional protesters."
In the 1982 book •Roots of
·
Radicalism,• by Stanley Rothman ands. Robert Lichter, the authors note
that •reformers and radicals have historically depended upon youthful
exuberance and idealism• to serve their own political ends. Young people
have always been subject to such manipulation. Even Aristotle complained
that the young •have exalted notions because they have not yet been
humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations.... They would
always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated