Man Of The Year: The Inheritor

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People really take it? Can they endure all the abrasive relationships and anomalous demands—the psychological subway wheels—that the "real world" has to offer? Can they, as a first step, accommodate their own parents? "The generational gap is wider than I've ever seen it in my lifetime," says Harvard's David Riesman. Predicts Britain's Leslie Paul, whose autobiography gave the phrase "angry young man" to the world in 1951: "The relations of the generations may become the central social issue of the next 50 years, as the relations between the classes have been for the past half-century."

The questing, restless majority of the young may already be ahead of that issue. By the existential act of rejecting cogito, ergo sum for sum, ergo sum, they have taken on, willy-nilly, a vast commitment toward a kindlier, more equitable society. The young often seem romantics in search of a cause, rebels without raison d'etre. Yet in many ways they are markedly saner, more unselfish, less hag-ridden than their elders.

Insulated by an ever-lengthening edu cational process from the instant adult hood they seek, pressed by modern change and technology into a precocious appreciation — often misguided —of the world they face, they are amazingly resilient. Job Corps Sociologist David Gottlieb, 36, who was himself a dropout, finds in the Now People "a certain fidelity and loyalty that older people don't have." American G.I.s in South Viet Nam, for example, evince little envy or disapproval of their draft-exempt brothers-on-campus at home, despite student protests against their sacrifice. "This is an experience you get a lot out of," says Sgt. James Hender son, 21, of Guthrie, Ky. "If you live through it."

Indeed, Viet Nam has given the young — protesters and participants alike — the opportunity to disprove the doom criers of the 1950s who warned that the next generation would turn out spineless and grey-flannel-souled. Henry David Thoreau would have felt at home with the young of the 60's, they are as appalled as he was at the thought of leading "lives of quiet desperation." In deed, for the future, the generation now in command can take solace from its offspring's determination to do better.

They will have to. For better or for worse, the world today is committed to accelerating change: radical, wrenching, erosive of both traditions and old values. Its inheritors have grown up with rapid change, are better prepared to accommodate it than any in history, indeed embrace change as a virtue in itself. With his skeptical yet humanistic outlook, his disdain for fanaticism and his scorn for the spurious, the Man of the Year suggests that he will infuse the future with a new sense of morality, a transcendent and contemporary ethic that could infinitely enrich the "empty society." If he succeeds (and he is prepared to) the Man of the Year will be a man indeed — and have a great deal of fun in the process.