The Port Huron Statement

It is unbelievable how elements of America's past can remain so strongly prevalent in modern day society. With my knowledge of the Civil Rights movement severely limited to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and Rosa Park's refusing to leave her bus seat, courtesy of my history text books, I would never before this class have known something as powerful as the Port Huron Statement ever existed. Beyond that it got the attention of fed-up white college students in the 1960s, the ideas and methodology described in it are well beyond its time. I couldn't help on more than one occasion to read what was being said not in the context of the Cold War and Civil Rights Reform, but in the context of our current push for democracy in the Middle East and our current Health Care reform debacle. It especially stuck out to me that their discussion of inadequate technology applies quite well with Facebook's current take-over of the minds and spirits of American college-age youth. "Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization," it states, "men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness." Facebook and their system of "groups" have, as of late, become politically anti- or pro- various issues like War, Darfur, the Economy, and so on. However, while joining one of these groups may show where you stand, I would say nearly nobody in any of those groups actually ventures off the Internet to begin to organize and make a physical difference. The initiative is there on behalf of the group's creator, but it is merely a "program without vision," and the biggest problem is, "there are few new prophets." It goes on then to accurately outline what was common amongst college students back then, and unfortunately still is today. "Almost no students value activity as citizens..." it states, "[a]ttention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people...making solid contacts for later on). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind." I agree that this is still the case today despite the existence of more student-run grassroots movements, because despite the nobility of them, the majority still rest in what those involved can gain from participation versus what society can gain from their existence. Overall I find it startling how poignant this work written in the 1960s still is today, and with that realization I find it equally as frightening that if we have had 40+ years to make these changes and still haven't gotten it 100% correct, whats to say we aren't doomed to become the very thing they feared: a society viable purely for, "its quantity of rockets," and not, "its quality of life."