1. Shortly before his graduation, Jim Binns, president of the senior class at Stanford University, wrote me about some of his misgivings. "More than any other generation," he said, "our generation views the adult world with great skepticism.., there is also an increased tendency to reject completely that world."
     2. Apparently he speaks for a lot of his contemporaries. During the last few years, I have listened to scores of young people, in college and out, who were just as nervous about the grown-up world. Roughly, their attitude might be summed up about like this: "The world is in pretty much of a mess, full of injustice, poverty, and war. The people responsible are, presumably, the adults who have been running things. If they can't do better than that, what have they got to teach our generation? That kind of lesson we can do without."  
     3. These conclusions strike me as reasonable, at least from their point of view. The relevant question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with it. For all its harshness and irrationality, it is the only world we've got. Choosing a strategy to cope with it, then, is the first decision young adults have to make, and usually the most important decision of their lifetime. So far as I have been able to discover, there are only four basic alternatives: