Is the Obama Era Heralding a Return to Sixties Values?

Frank Rich got it about right this week in the New York Times as he applauded Harvard's President and Ohio Weslyan's cajloing new graduates to forgoe the promises of getting rich and do something important for humanity.Rich quotes first Dr Drew Giplin Faust who urged the new grads to

to "Find work you love,” adding that The “most remunerative” job choice “may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying.”
This same note was hit a month earlier by the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama. “The big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy,” he said, amount to “a poverty of ambition.” He wasn’t speaking idly. As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.



Obama had choices--but many of today's grads know that the high paying jobs on Wall Street aren't likely to come back for a while if at all. The loans however that it took to enter the Ivy League are not going anywhere and so most new graduates will have to look forward to a long period of reduced lifestyles before they can become the new masters of the universe.
Good thing though? Non profits and idealistic enterprises can sure use the brainpower that would otherwise be wasted making huge bonuses for not very economically productive work.

So our "thought leaders" will need to help our young students whose reward system has been measured out in dollar signs with new harsher realities. Boomers will have to rise to the challenge too. As the parents of many of these youngsters -they have a role to inform them of the choices they made not necessarily between serving mamon and public service but in terms of the humanistic values they recognize as important and lasting. Good luck everyone as we enter (re-enter) this brave new idealistic age.
Let's hope this one--makes the lasting improvements that the sixties seemed only to promise us.