THE INTERGENERATIONAL CHASM
Maureen Howard
In these modern times, when neither economic advantage non the nation's good is well-served by fecundity, we reproduce mainly to project ourselves, in some form, into the future not via time machine but by the transmission of our own values, culture, and traditions. If the next generation rejects these in toto, we lose that rickety bridge to a kind of immortality that makes the often dreary business of child-rearing worthwhile.
What had turned the recent past into a nightmare for many middle-class parents was the loss of their future in just such terms. Here was the legend given flesh in which their own fine children were stolen from the hearth by the elf thieves of the counterculture who left in their place changelings—bewitched mystics, madmen, bombers and junkies—none of whom would take a place in the continuum of the traditional community....
The children of those changelings... [are being reared in] urban and rural communes, and institutes of the new religions (those of Lamas and Hare Knishnas). [In one] a 10-year-old girl managed to keep an immaculately conventional bedroom—gingham bedspread, curtains, mirror and hairbrushes carefully placed on a dressing table. "If you want to have a straight kid, then be a freaky mother," her mother everlastingly spaced, complained one day.
