America’s Bankrupt Generation: Dead Weight Dragging the USA Down

By John Stanton

There is a scene from the 1967 movie classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that speaks to the title of this article. The movie stars Spencer Tracey, Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and a who’s who of character actors of the day. It’s the story of a black man and white woman who have fallen in love with each other and plan to get married. The couple have decided to break that news to their parents who initially condemn their love and plan to marry. The parent’s initial opposition does not take into account the young couple’s understanding that their love for each other is taboo and that they will be challenged mightily by political and social forces arrayed against them. Nonetheless, the lovers intend to challenge the system and leap forward together no matter what the parent’s opinion of them (although Sidney Poitier gives Spencer Tracy an out). If the parents had their way (initially) they would have rejected the arrangement and opted to maintain the status quo of the day; that is, no marriage or relationship.

In the movie, the parent’s education, knowledge and experiences have been shaped in an era (1910-1967) that is light years removed from their children’s time and place. Tracey and Hepburn are an affluent couple in San Francisco (Tracey is a retired newspaper editor) while Poitier’s parents are hardened middle class (the Dad, played brilliantly by Roy Glenn, is a retired mailman).

The father’s are essentially civil servants; one delivers/creates the news, the other is entrusted with the US mail. They both have climbed the steep social and economic ladders of the time, and managed to produce stellar offspring. The parents, now elders apparently settled and wise from years of working and living, try to discourage the couple at every turn.

Until the parents relent in the end, we learn that the wisdom they’ve accumulated is nearly irrelevant to the time in which they live. Indeed, in one scene Tracey drives out to get an ice cream at a local drive-in restaurant but is flustered by the ordering process and the presence of youngsters he can’t or does not want to understand.

Poitier’s father, Glenn, is not amused at the prospects of the marriage. He, like most parents/elders, reminds Poitier how much he had to work so that his son could get the good things in life. He warns Poitier that in “16 to 17 States, what you are doing is against the law and even if the law were changed, people’s attitudes don’t change”

But in Poitier’s mind, even this view is outdated and irrelevant.

Poitier then drives home a message which echos still from the 1967 movie set; a message that spoke not only to civil rights but to an entire generation that wanted to free itself from the selfishness of an older generation that could not break from its own past.

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