We/They: The New Campus Dialogue

It seems only a short time ago that college students were exploring the thou of each other. True, some of them went about their quest in unorthodox ways like voyeurism or multiple love-making, but to most collegians confrontation was not necessarily cohabitation, and a meaningful dialogue was an exchange of ideas in the cafeteria over half-spilled cups of coffee. Then the sociologists, who are always inventing new phrases to keep the mother tongue oscillating with vitality, plunged us into the “generation gap.” Unfortunately the spirit of the “I-thou” which was supposed to hyphenate all of us (black-white, Christian- Jew, liberal-conservative) could not quite straddle the abyss. So the pronouns changed, the slash replaced the hyphen, and with all due respect to the Aquarians, this is really the dawning of the Age of the Self, the era of the “we/they.”

The phrase may be less aesthetic than “I-thou” but it is more adaptable, for it can reflect the point of view of either the individual or the Establishment. The students who inscribed we WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT now! on the walls of the London School of Economics made it quite clear that by “we” they did not mean the ineffably human “we of me” that Frankie Addams spoke of in The Member of the Wedding. Rather it was the self-assertive, chest-pounding, tribal “we”—true gut instead of true grit. Likewise the father whose son has just called him a “pig” for disclaiming all responsibility for the genocide of the Indians will confide to a crony: “We messed up the world, so maybe they can do something better with it.” And it is significant that Marya Mannes calls her anti-youth novel They as if we would all understand.

BD

About the Author

Bernard F. Dick

Featured Tags

It seems only a short time ago that college students were exploring the thou of each other. True, some of them went about their quest in unorthodox ways like voyeurism or multiple love-making, but to most collegians confrontation was not necessarily cohabitation, and a meaningful dialogue was an exchange of ideas in the cafeteria over half-spilled cups of coffee. Then the sociologists, who are always inventing new phrases to keep the mother tongue oscillating with vitality, plunged us into the “generation gap.” Unfortunately the spirit of the “I-thou” which was supposed to hyphenate all of us (black-white, Christian- Jew, liberal-conservative) could not quite straddle the abyss. So the pronouns changed, the slash replaced the hyphen, and with all due respect to the Aquarians, this is really the dawning of the Age of the Self, the era of the “we/they.”

The phrase may be less aesthetic than “I-thou” but it is more adaptable, for it can reflect the point of view of either the individual or the Establishment. The students who inscribed we WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT now! on the walls of the London School of Economics made it quite clear that by “we” they did not mean the ineffably human “we of me” that Frankie Addams spoke of in The Member of the Wedding. Rather it was the self-assertive, chest-pounding, tribal “we”—true gut instead of true grit. Likewise the father whose son has just called him a “pig” for disclaiming all responsibility for the genocide of the Indians will confide to a crony: “We messed up the world, so maybe they can do something better with it.” And it is significant that Marya Mannes calls her anti-youth novel They as if we would all understand.