University of Virginia Library

A New Era?

So suddenly have we embarked on a new
decade; to judge from the pronouncements of
the media in the past week, the advent of the
1970's marks a watershed in the American
experience. The changing of the year, we've
been told, is a fit time for reflections on our
experience and resolutions for our futures.

Perhaps; but January 1, 1970 still seemed
suspiciously like the day after December 31,
1969. Certainly the same old problems were
there, wearing the same old faces. Their
depressing presence reinforced the notion that
the new decade was but an artificial
demarcation on the continuum of our
existence. Man's historical sense gives rise to
the urge to compartmentalize time into
identifiable periods like the Roaring '20s, and
perhaps the perspective of history will
eventually allow us to characterize the '60s
with an epithet; but the stuff of the '60s is
still with us, lingering into the '70s.

An author named Channing Philips
recently published a book about the '30s
called "From the Crash to the Blitz," which
used the type of perspective that we are now
denied to mark off the period from the stock
market crash in 1929 to the beginning of
World War II as an era; things were never the
same before or after those two cataclysms.
This seems like a much more sensible method
for splitting eras than the distinctions of the
calendar, but it makes the task much more
difficult. The real watersheds are sometimes
obscure; their geneses are difficult to pinpoint
and their terminations equally so.

Obviously, the trends and developments
that made the '60s what they were are still
with us. The battle for black liberation, the
war in Vietnam, the environmental crisis and
all the dilemmas to which the '60s gave birth
are left for the '70s to solve. So a better way
to speculate at the beginning of this decade
might be to project the final resolutions of the
crises begun in the '60s, to attempt to predict
the nature of the future events which will
mark the actual watersheds of the new era to
come.

In 1960, nightclub comedians were kidding
Los Angeles about its smog, which was a
charming new word coined to describe the
murky Southern California atmosphere. Lake
Eric was just about reaching total pollution.
At the beginning of 1970, predictions were
being made that man had 35 years to live
before his environment became so foul that it
could not sustain him, and ecologists were
warning of the imminence of irreversible
pollution. So one of the watersheds of the
new era could be the advent of a gas mask
culture necessitated by the total pollution of
the atmosphere. Or we could see the United
States meet the challenge by sacrificing
short-term industrial and transport convenience
for the long-term necessity of
preserving a livable environment. One thing is
certain: the choice cannot be put off for very
much longer.

In much the same way, America's crisis in
black and white seems hellbent for a climax.
1969 ended with a series of apparent police
murders of the Black Panther leadership. It
seems likely that they may have been the first
skirmishes in an all-out racial war. Given the
present proclivities of racial relations in
America, some sort of genocidal warfare is the
most probable outcome of the present
conflict, unless we can find new methods for
achieving progress and ameliorating conflict
between blacks and whites.

And if interracial civil war does not mark
the watershed of the decade, international war
may. Vietnam is the most obvious locus for
such a conflict; but other areas of the Third
World will generate the same types of
big-power conflicts in the '70s, perhaps in
Asia, but more probably in Latin America, the
Middle East, or in Africa. The watershed of
the era might be a rising temperature in the
Cold War which culminates in World War III.
Or it might be a decision on the part of the
U.S. and the Soviet Union to join in a policy
of cooperation for the interests of mankind.

There are other possibilities. The population
explosion may touch off a worldwide
famine. Space exploration might produce
technological breakthroughs that will parallel
the discovery of the New World, serving to
relieve the pressure on the old. No one can tell
with any certainty when this era will end. It
may well drag on throughout the '70s. But it
will not continue in its present state
indefinitely. Something has to give