I’m from the government and I’m here to help you. First sentence in the U.S. Public Health Service’s Healthfacts for those 50 and over: “It’s too late to die young.”
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Is it possible that decentralization and integration don’t mix? Lorraine Forte reports in Catalyst (December) that in 1987 216 Chicago public schools were outside the guidelines for integrated faculties (30-60 percent white, 40-70 percent minority). In 1992, four years after school reform gave principals increased hiring powers, the teaching staffs at 338 schools were outside the guidelines.
“You [baby boomers] wonder about the nature of the ‘twenty-somethings’: here’s your answer,” write Tom Frank and Keith White in the Chicago-based Baffler, reprinted in Alternative Press Review (Winter). “We are Twenty-Nothing, forever lost to your suburban platitudes; lost to the simple blather of your TV; deaf to your non-politics; hopelessly estranged from your cult of ‘professionalism,’ the brain-deadening architecture of your office complexes….Thus we proclaim your American Century at an end, with a shrug of distaste rather than the bang you had counted on. We are a generation that finally says No to your favorite institutions: not only will we not fight for oil, but we don’t believe anything that you broadcast, we avoid your malls, we don’t care about the free play of signifiers on your cable TV. And you can never be rid of us.”
