ANXIETY AND THE MILLENNIUM

After reading Ronald Brownstein’s “The New Age of Anxiety” and Michael Ventura’s “The 21st Century Is Now” (May 8), I had to write this letter. I’m a 23-year-old African American woman who graduated from Stanford, luckily has a job and has benefited from the courageous, collective struggles of my predecessors. I’m middle class, went to the best schools, went to summer camp and swam in the same pool with my Irish, Jewish and Asian friends.

Some people ask me why I’ve been so worried when I have so much, why I’m so glum and can’t pull myself together. I have no excuse.

However, these insightful and profound articles led me to reasons why I feel so unglued at times. Take malls, for example: They’ve always made me feel edgy, even irritable. In and out. Buy and sell. Park and leave. I really hate malls. And worse than that, the thought of shopping from my home computer makes me nauseated.

We have managed to sacrifice community for convenience. It has become much harder to speak our minds, to confront each other’s limitations face to face.

These articles were a revelation. I feel a new sense of strength. I’m strong enough to feel in this push-push-to-make-it-to-the-top world.

So I’m leaving my job to pursue teaching for a year in Nigeria, where there are no malls and no fax. I’ll return to America in 1995. Starting now I will make “millions of small decisions that create our world” and “exert my enormous powers.” I will use my super-duper computer to write kind letters to my friends around the world--even to strangers like Brownstein and Ventura, who don’t seem very strange after all.

JENNIFER CULLINS

Hollywood

After reading Brownstein’s brilliant essay on the shape of what is and what isn’t in the world we live in, I’d say that an era of uncertainty as pervasive as the one surrounding us all demands a very large portion of both patience and prudence combined with some bold vision.

We need more determined diplomacy, more look-before-you-leap congressional and military judgment and a return to media of studied intelligence and reason. Perhaps down that path we may find the highest common denominator, one to lead us together to restore a more livable community of tolerance and trust in ourselves in a brave new world.

F. LADLOW

Palm Desert

One thing Brownstein virtually skipped was our involvement in the Vietnam War, which by itself shaped our troubled present.

I’m reminded of what Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton in “The Good Society” wrote about the “Me Generation” of the ‘80s: “They (the people interviewed) realize that, though the processes of separation and individuation were necessary to free us from the tyrannical structures of the past, they must be balanced by a renewal of commitment and community if they are not to end in self-destruction or turn into their opposites. Such a renewal is indeed a world waiting to be born if only we had the courage to see it.”

ANDREW KAY LIBERMAN

Beverly Hills

Brownstein’s article has relieved my anxiety by putting the uncertainty I feel about our world’s future in its place--as a necessary and recurring theme in history. It’s also reassuring that President Clinton seems to have a grip on “the vision thing.” Your article was better than Xanax.

DIANNE DALEY

Hermosa Beach

So: “From 1947 to 1973, the median family income doubled.” And: “Over the past 20 years, the median family income has been virtually stagnant.”

And this: “Congress virtually sealed off immigration . . . from 1930 to 1970 . . . .” And: “Congress revised the immigration laws in 1965, opening the gates for a second wave of migrants . . . .”

In other words, allowing for a time lag while policies take hold, there seems to be a correlation between the economic prosperity and stability of this country when immigration is low and the reverse when immigration numbers are high.

R. PRUCHNICKI

Culver City

Brownstein says that uncertainty is the price of renewal, but a more appropriate and realistic statement would be: Ever-increasing and ever-more-vicious crime is the price of uncertainty and hopelessness. We will continue to pay dearly with crime and chaos until we start giving the sociologists equal time with the economists, who seemingly care not a whit about the imminent breakdown of America’s middle class and, coincidentally, America as we have known it.

DR. GEORGE R. TYNDALL

Los Angeles

Ventura says in “The 21st Century Is Now” that he’s watching lots of television, getting older and becoming confused. Here he comes, the hood ornament of the 21st Century.

His essay asserts that civilization “is about what normal struggling people do” and not about “newsmakers who number only a tiny percentage” of us. Good! So Ross Perot wields no more clout than a street person. If Alan Greenspan announces higher interest rates, I’ll announce lower ones.

Ventura blames each of us for trying to spend less, thereby eliminating our own jobs, for being choosy shoppers in a wonderfully self-correcting free market. There we were, silly middle-class savers whose incomes slipped down a shallow, two-decade-long slope. We should have splurged while patriotic businesses gave our jobs to desperate neighbors across the border at exiguous wages, yielding greater profits than ever.

I certainly understand why Ventura wakes up in his “small apartment . . . confused about what’s next.”

EDDIE VELA

Laguna Beach

As a student of “classical civilization,” I’ve come to terms with the realization that we are repeat offenders throughout the course of human history. This time, however, we have speeded things up drastically. We have experienced many victories and disappointments, a classical period and a renaissance, all crammed into the 20th Century. Currently, we are experiencing nostalgia as proof of decades of transitions.

I agree that the dysfunctional community, family and school are a result of our conventionalization and untutored decision making, which have removed the function of the individual. We should have already learned that what affects the individual affects the tribe, the community and, subsequently, the nation.

The arts tell us a great deal about ourselves, past and present. We need to look to the arts to find our way, and that is why I agree that the power to change the future is in the hands of the people.

We are truly at the end of an era; all the signs are there. But it’s an end we probably have created for ourselves. If we study history well and trust in humanity, although the end is near, the beginning will always be around there, too.

PATRICK RODELA

Los Angeles

I agree wholeheartedly with Ventura’s premise, but I have to challenge his contention that the 21st Century begins with the year 2000. It begins in 2001. For example, the first century was AD 1 to 100 (there was no year zero), the second century 101 to 200 and so forth. The millennium ends with the year 2000.

CHARLES LEE

Camarillo

Somehow, we Angelenos have overemphasized the private domain at the expense of the public one. We’ve been promised more luxury options inside our locked car doors, inside our electronic gates and inside our office buildings with windows that in many cases do not open to the outside world. But the price of self-involved luxury is loneliness, alienation and, ultimately and frequently, violence.

One solution to the disintegration of community may be in our facing up to the real price we pay for hiding in our private shells. Is isolation the inevitable byproduct of progress? Isn’t community interaction worth progressing toward, too? If so, perhaps we can use our existing tools and new technologies to re-emphasize our public spaces, be they Italian markets or farmers’ markets. Perhaps we can re-emphasize the role of interest groups, be they writing groups or ethnic-pride groups. Perhaps we need to re-emphasize the importance of feeling good, rather than just looking good at our social and athletic clubs.

Perhaps we can start rebuilding the smaller communities that provide the texture for the city in which we’ve all chosen to live. That, in turn, would revitalize our larger, common community and our sense of interconnectedness.

JOSEPH HANANIA

Santa Monica