问答题 The term Silent Generation may have been unflattering, but it was not inaccurate. (46)In the '50s, America seemed both workable and working, which allowed us the luxury of growing up in peace and security: Unlike those who preceded or those who followed us, we were not expected to fight or die for our country. The grievances of poverty, race and inequality were no less valid than they are today, but we were largely unaware of them. And so, for most of us, they did not exist.
We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the antiheroes of fiction or film. (47)For us, coolness was all; we prided ourselves on being excellent critics, even of ourselves, as if we had a third eye looking in rather than out. We did not care so much what the good fight was, so long as it was waged with effortless style and nonchalance.
(48)Skeptical vision is a quality of the good journalist--and our generation has produced an extraordinary number of good journalists but it is usually fatal to the novelist or poet, who must have conviction in order to create. Our outstanding artists of prose and poetry can be counted quite literally on the fingers of one hand. Even the best of them seem uncomfortable with the major theses of life and death.
(49)Most of us deny it, sincerely no doubt, but we are envious of the young; we were, after all, so close to having the same freedoms and so near to their new world. We are envious of something else: time and time again it has been the young who have led the way in attacking a war that many of us also believe is wrong. Older and better equipped to protest, more of us should have taken the initiative.
But the revolutionaries among us, political or cultural, are a minority; reform, not revolution, is our aim. (50)As a generation, we are distinguished by our lack of anger: Circled by fury, we are the unfurious; surround- ed by passion, we are the dispassionate. Most of us by this time have made a commitment to the kind of coun- try we want to live in. Still, it is a commitment based on reason; we are appalled, all of us, by the automatic reflexes of those younger or older than we are. Detached, observed always by that invisible third eye, we still find it impossible to deliver ourselves completely to slogans and ideologies.