Port Huron Statement Analysis

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In a time of confusion, fear, helplessness, and widespread apathy of the American people towards societal issues in the early 1960’s, the Students of a Democratic Society (SDS) dared to create a manifesto that challenged the traditional way of thinking and perceiving the world around them. These students had grown up with fairly comfortable lives where they could blindly accept the American ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all. At college, however, in light of social ills such as racial discrimination, the Cold War, and widespread disparity between the “have and have-nots” (both domestically and abroad), they came to recognize the harsh reality that these traditional American ideals were not actually translated into the policies…show more content…
There would have been an emphasis on the establishment of a “truly public sector ” which would shift from government spending of a majority on the military to the improvement of the social welfare as a whole. This society would have been based off of caring for one another and “concentrating on genuine social priorities… for people to live in with dignity and creativeness” instead of competing in fear or apathetically submitting to the social norm of independence and compartmentalization. This ideal society was one based on peace as a means to end the war and included provisions of disarmament, restructured alliances and treaties between countries and ratified by the United Nations, and the development and capacity building of international nations, regardless if they were socialist or communist . The rights explicitly mentioned in the document included those found in the Bill of Rights such as “freedom of speech, assembly, thought, religion, and press” which would not be seen as threats but rather guarantees to a productive democratic system. Rights were also expanded to include equality in civil, social, medical, educational, property, and economic rights, and include the protection and resilience of the individual from the government and big business. Privileges imagined in…show more content…
Several paradoxes existed, and could be argued to still exist, but the most significant one as indicated by the document itself was that the students were “imbued with urgency, yet the message of [the American] society [was] that there [was] no viable alternative to the present.” How were they supposed to draw attention to matters that others had deemed insignificant or obsolete? The challenge to overcoming this paradox was solved by breaking down the naivety of the mass populous and creating a society that questioned and strived for more for themselves and others. This lack of control, attention, or interest directly affected the other paradoxes that existed in the students lives: the fact that America declares equality for all and yet marginalizes a group of people due to their race; the proclamations of peace by America in the Cold War while secretly fueling up for an arms race; the great and yet destructive potential of nuclear power; the image of the overwhelming wealth and influence of the United States and the lack of effort to facilitate that growth in other nations . These paradoxes, like the first one mentioned, are completely influential to a society, especially if they go unnoticed or unquestioned, because they seem daunting, even impossible, to overcome as a task. If they are not
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