Strawberry Restatement

James S. Kunen was 19 and a Columbia University sophomore when he wrote The Strawberry Statement, a wry account of Columbia's 1968 student strike against the Viet Nam War. The book's instant success transformed Kunen into one of the spokesmen for the rebels of his generation. Since then, Kunen, now 37, has served as a conscientious objector, worked as a public defender in the Washington court system, been married and divorced. Now a senior writer at PEOPLE magazine, he was asked by TIME to comment on what has happened to him and his protesting peers of the '60s who now seem to have quietly joined the Establishment.

"You've got the power," I wrote in The Strawberry Statement, 18 years ago. "You make millions of people suffer . . . Well cut it out, will you? Just stop it. If you won't stop it, we'll stop you."

The "we" I was presuming to speak for were the student protesters of the '60s, and the "you" were the remote and powerful men who were exploiting and oppressing the "People." Two decades later, it's terribly clear that we haven't changed the world very much; the question is, how much has the world changed us?

As young "radicals," we considered ourselves the conscience of the nation. To us, the Viet Nam War was a moral offense, not a question of politics; we reacted to it primarily in moral, rather than political terms. Somehow, by the strength of our youth, the nation would be wrenched from the grip of death, cleansed, made new. A "movement" without politics or program, we were defined largely by our shared lives on the campus--millions of us getting stoned and listening to the Beatles--and by our opposition to the war. Now that war is over, and we inhabit private worlds.

Still, when I speak with old "radical" friends--none of whom are leading noticeably radical lives--I find that our political views haven't changed that much. We're dismayed by slashes in social programs and appalled by the contra war against Nicaragua. Why, then, aren't we heard from? Why aren't we marching in the streets?

Paradoxically, we felt a more excruciating responsibility for the acts of our nation then, as 19-year-olds who couldn't even vote, than we do now. We took things more personally. We felt that we were bombing Viet Nam, and we were allowing the poorer and less well connected of our generation to die there. Now, we say, it's the Reagan Administration that builds and occasionally drops bombs.

- We no longer believe that we can remake the world. Instead we adapt to it and act cautiously, because we have much more to lose. We have our careers. In the booming economy of the '60s, the affluent youth's greatest concern about a career was how to avoid one. A career was part of the System, within which success and exploitation, work and war, were inextricably linked. ("Work! Study! Get Ahead! Kill!" we used to chant at demonstrations.) Also, embarking on a career meant accepting the constraints of adulthood. I thought if I didn't settle down, I could stay young forever. I was wrong. You get old whether you're wearing a necktie or not.