We are all smiles now

When did I first notice that everyone was smiling, indeed laughing? It must have been when I returned from Japan, circa 1980. The TV commercial that most impressed me in this respect was for a soda -- Coke or Sprite. It showed a party of happy young people, on a beach perhaps. All were happy, all were smiling. I also noticed at that time that people were more gentle, especially with their kids. You noticed it on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I had come to live (and still reside).

I could not fail to notice a great change in the moral atmosphere of the U.S. Had I not been absent from the U.S. for several years at the end of the 1970s, this change might not have been so apparent to me. One seemingly small thing caught my attention immediately on my return. It was the kinder, gentler mood of child-raising that I observed. Parents, I noticed, constantly talked to their kids, even with babes in strollers. They had conversations with three- and four-year-olds, as if they were adults. They held hands with their children way beyond what one would have seen in the 1950s: fathers with girls on the verge of puberty, mothers with their growing sons. Little League teams were made up of girls and boys. Parents immediately demanded to know what their kids wanted on entering a store. Yes, a gentler, kinder world, one contrasting to the era in which my generation had been raised, when we had been required to eat all the vegetables on our plate at dinner and when our parents took the side of teachers, not of children.

It turns out that this small difference was really not so small at all, and it was a sign of the different priorities of my cohort going forward. Gentleness, kindness, after all, are virtues that are easy to practice when you never doubt that you will always have a roof over your head and enough to eat. And it is only one generation in American history that has been so fortunate in this respect. It was our values, those of the authentic “Sixties” generation — of tolerance and gentleness, of feeling good about ourselves — that now began to dominate American life.

It is perhaps not surprising that young people in TV commercials in 1980 looked so happy. The commercials, after all, were produced by my cohort, the people who were now doing well. We had entered "the institutions" by the early 1970s: the universities, the media, the professions. By 1980, however, the U.S. was entering an age of economic instability that still affects most Americans. Remember the oil crisis of 1973? The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, the U.S. had allowed itself to become dependent on oil imports.

The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” as it says in Rilke's poem. Indeed.

Instead, we continue to smile.

Picture credit: Coca Cola Journey