Americans are in withdrawal from public life

The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people „giving up“ all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed „international affairs“ fourteenth on their list of „problems“ but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.

Port Huron Statement, SDS, June 11-15, 1962.

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