I wondered, particularly after again seeing the 25 year video, how people felt about how our class and its generation have affected the world, and to what extent we have made it a better or worse. We started out in a time of often tumultuous change with high ideals and expectations. America was employed, doing well and declaring war on poverty here and abroad. The civil rights movement was in full sway, many of us agreed with it and some even participated. Many positive changes have happened but the African American neighborhood around Walnut looks worse than it did with abandoned homes and buildings. While there is a bigger black middle class than there was, for too many the old Jim Crow has been replaced with a new one of incarceration, unemployment and poor quality urban schools (lacking the library research facilities we saw Saturday and the support of affluent alums like us). Segregation in fact remains and the legal theories have not kept up. And I can only be shocked by the high number of deceased African American classmates. We have experienced an expansion of opportunity for women and the sexual revolution (more after we were at Walnut than before). The daunting otherworldliness of dating was replaced by more authentic relationships and many of us have experienced premarital sex, divorce and serial relationships, many successful. However the society as a whole seems not to have figured sexuality out. Gender roles have changed. Some fallout of the Vietnam era graduate school draft was that the law schools filled our empty seats with women. Today more women than men are in law school and entering practice, but not the top rungs of the profession, something that may change eventually. This is another area we have not figured out. Homosexuality is something many of our children and grandchildren have come to accept. In our time this was a subject of ill defined whispers about fellow students and teachers, combined by some verbal jousting by imaginative articulated descriptions of supposed homosexual acts by one’s adversary, all divorced from reality. All of this was tied up with issues of masculinity and bullying. I may not be looking in the right places but have not seen a lot of comfort with this aspect of life in our class. Walnut was my first time to encounter Jewish peers and our time at Walnut was the time of Anne Frank the Deputy and the Eichmann trial. Today the anti-Semitism of our parent’s age is gone, but it has been replaced by issues about the country of Israel its actions and its future. Class was a major issue in who hung out with who at Walnut, and remains a major division in how our society operates. Few miss the USSR and Cold war but we are having trouble critiquing our economic system and improving it. Perhaps a few of us are in the 1% and many are in the top 20%. But income and wealth inequality has grown drastically. Even our educated children and grandchildren are having difficulties finding employment that takes advantage of it. Education and intellect, the be all end all of Walnut, remains too much the property of the privileged, facing powerful strands or resistance and denial. Similar with art and literature, and the rock and roll of Bette Rappaport, Don Lee and “Out on Bond” has become a sound track for advertising. Society has had huge progress in medicine, technology and communication, and a questionable benefit of financial complexity but not so much elsewhere. We have stagnant wages and an employment crisis, while US poverty may seem like luxury compared to some places elsewhere even as it is emotional hell for those experiencing it. The Peace Corps, domestic and foreign, were inspirational to us but not that effective, and if anything is raising world living standards it is global capitalism seeking cheap labor, with questionable social and environmental effects. The political idealism inspired by Kennedy and briefly revived by Obama’s campaign, have sunk into a polarized big sort of those who embrace or reject the various arms of conservatism, which makes the divisions of 1957-63 look like a time of Edenlike cooperation. Violence, guns, and the denigration of others seem a challenge to any system of community and underlying politics that might make it work.

This is the legacy our class and generation leaves to the world. Obviously we didn’t necessarily make the big decisions and may even have opposed them. But we were all participants. Now our time is coming to a close. How do we feel about our legacy? What should we have done differently?

Stan

Let's look at it from a different perspective. When I entered Tulane, it was the first year that anyone of color was able to be admitted, and they couldn't live in the dorm. This is within our lifetime. The change here from our day forward has been positive and in many places not swift but continuous.

Does prejudice exist for Jews, Blacks, Indians, Orientals, Irish, Muslims, sure, but that isn't new. You and I both read about this in Ancient History. Even the earliest versions of literature mention it.

But my greatest take home point from your essay is, that you care about social injustice. We are 50 years older than we were in our Wonder Bread years, and you still care. That is the remarkable and hopeful bottom line.

I will offer my advice:

DON'T CHANGE!!!!

Lynda Lane

PS- I worked at HUD for five years doing EEO, went to Med School where there were 10 women in 100 person class, and did an Internship with 2 women in a group of 30. I have faced lots of odds with a perfect sense of being oblivious to the dangers, and luckily am still here to tell about it. So take my advice written above. I will see you at our next reunion. We can talk.