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."
    1)斯坦福大学四年级班主席吉姆·宾斯在毕业前不久给我写了一封信，谈到他的一些不安。信上说：“我们这一代比任何一代人都抱着更大的疑虑看待成人世界……同时也越来越倾向于全盘拒绝那个世界。”
    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."
    2)显然他的话代表了许多同龄人的看法。在过去几年中我听了大学内外几十个年轻人的谈话，他们对成年人的世界同样感到不安。大致说来他们的态度可以归纳如下：“世界情况很糟，充满了不公正、贫困和战争。想来对此负责的应是那些掌管大事的成年人。如果他们也不过如此的话，他们能拿什么来教育我们这一代人呢?：我们不需要这类的教导。”  
    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:
    3)我觉得这些结论是合乎情理的，至少从他们的观点看来是如此。对成长中的一代人来说，与此相关的问题并不是我们的社会是否不完美 (我们可以视此为当然)，而是如何应付它。尽管它严酷而又不合理，它终究是我们具有的唯一的世界。因而刚步入成人时期的年青人必须做出的第一个决定就是选择一个应付这个世界的战略，这常常是他们一生中最重要的一个决定。就我所看到的，只有四种基本选择：