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  • Hello, It's David Hoffman, filmmaker.

  • I'm sitting here at the time of the Corona virus pandemic in my office, and I'm thinking about my life.

  • I've been around a while other times when things were stressed like they are now.

  • And I know some people are going to be seeing this video far in the future when I'm not even sure you'll remember what the Corona virus waas.

  • But it's a time when everybody's afraid.

  • Everybody's home.

  • Things are pretty shocking, not only in America but around the world.

  • So there was this other time.

  • It was back in 1968 and 69 when the United States was completely fractured.

  • We were fractured.

  • 50% of us felt get out of the Vietnam War.

  • It's wrong.

  • 50% of us felt stand behind our government.

  • And if the government says the war is necessary, it is.

  • 50% felt the country was going backward and had to change, and 50% felt the country was moving forward and they arrested.

  • You just gotta shut up.

  • It was a very tense time.

  • Even in my own family.

  • I went to a Thanksgiving dinner where some family members fought with other family members and they didn't talk.

  • I mean, some people left the Thanksgiving.

  • It was very tense.

  • So I'm sitting in my office back in 1968 and a filmmaker approaches meaning Can Anderson much older than me.

  • He's a Christian filmmaker, and he shows me this movie called Confrontation, where he needs some of my footage.

  • The writing is beautiful, the way he expresses himself, how he puts the film together.

  • I said, Sure, you can use my footage and I never saw him again.

  • I know he went on to make some other films, but this film that I'm about to show you has never been on you.

  • Dude, I'm amazed by that.

  • And at this time of crisis, when the country is split, when things that divided when everything looks tense, I thought I'd run the confrontation film that Ken Anderson made solar ago, which has some of my footage.

  • If the time when you're watching this is such that there is no confrontation, there is no partisan divide in America or anywhere in the world.

  • This may seem very strange to you to see the country so fractured as it was back then, not a very comfortable world.

  • Be nice.

  • If we could find a place to hide, We can't.

  • Yeah, I can't run away to find out just what kind of world it is.

  • We've taken our cameras all across the face of it North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, particularly in search of young people.

  • What they're thinking saying, First of all, you have to remember that black people are people and what drives any human being.

  • And when you find out the things that drive in human beings such as hunger, thirst, anything else the need to belong, the need to feel a part of or the need to be respected This is what motivates a black man.

  • They stifle us, they put us in little boxes and we have to get out of those boxes.

  • Wait again.

  • I wanted to write lifestyle like the radical lifestyle longhair, hippies, dope.

  • All that kind of thing's just against the staff and all of these air model distortions of middle class American behavior anyway, not only the young people, but ordinary people of all ages to control their own lives for themselves, not allow a handful of politicians and businessmen to control what we think on what we do, the political system has to be restructured so that people have control over whatever institution is affecting them.

  • War, Some of them more militant groups.

  • And then some of the honkies establishment the businessmen, They've got so much against each other already that I think if they, uh, let it go, any father could really get nasty.

  • Have that life is different because everybody doesn't care about the others.

  • But back home, everybody cares about the other members of the black man is going to be the the leader of the revolution in America today.

  • Whether that revolution be violent or nonviolent, whether that revolution be political or religious or whatever.

  • He will be the leader simply because of the fact that he has been the most oppressed.

  • Plainly, the revolt is against the establishment.

  • The status quote, you're aware the terminology, Hippies, generation gap, the S.

  • D.

  • S.

  • We, of course, focused our cameras and other kids too.

  • You know, the so called silent majority.

  • But the action is with the protest.

  • They may be only a segment of our society, but they hold the fuses and relentless fire burns in their hearts.

  • We gotta listen to these kids when they talk.

  • They're not just making noise.

  • They're driving wedges, putting the extra routes that have grown long and deep in the soil of our society.

  • They're planting, too.

  • New ideas.

  • Revolutionary, iconoclastic, determined and better state.

  • Uncomfortable, isn't it?

  • Listening to those kids makes appreciate little more that our long oasis in church once a week.

  • Yeah, I got to get these people back inside a church back into the sanity secular of our society.

  • Suburbia.

  • Decency.

  • Can't they see what the establishment is done?

  • Don't they understand what the good life means?

  • No, they don't understand.

  • Can't I don't want to.

  • But that's not the issue, really.

  • The point is, we live in an era demanding change, immediate revolutionary change.

  • It's the priority topic on the lips of these young people before to take revolutionary accident action, much similar to the same things that were said that that set up the foundation of this country.

  • It was revolutionary radicals.

  • There is a gap between leadership and needs of the people.

  • There's always a cause behind it in the first place.

  • If everything was right, then that wouldn't be the rioting.

  • Well, like we feel that, you know, we just don't dig the straight society, a society that were born in.

  • We are not satisfied with the amount of control they have over their own lives way.

  • Want to give them more control?

  • People who control the economic system are using the political system for their own gain.

  • One of those selfish viewpoint and I'm proud of it.

  • Why?

  • Because I'm an individual and I have my individual rights.

  • It's a capital structure which has to basically inherent problems that are wrong with that one system based on exploitation, which is broken down to the exploitation of people of color, which is the racial question.

  • And two, It's an imperialist contradiction in the society, whereas you exploit people not in your soil going to foreign countries.

  • The Maureen Reagan.

  • So years in my country, the cost of living is getting higher on the percentage off.

  • The prostitution is getting higher, oppressed the SS anti imperialist, anti capitalist, anti racist as its general program, and we're fighting to make a revolutionary change in this country that turn it upside down to change it and destroy it as it is and replaced with a more human society plays with your mind.

  • I think one thing I would have to say that relation it destroys your mind.

  • Anyone who goes goes to this establishment goes up, is a little kid and becomes an adult the way that they want you to be, in other words, the exact hole in the IBM card that they have decided that you should be.

  • I think he come out with really very distorted, destroyed mind.

  • We're trying to change that.

  • Come gather round people wherever changes perhaps become most visible on the college campus, once traditional, where the only time things really got rough was during the big game on Saturday afternoon and where happiness was a tennis date after the last class on Tuesday.

  • Group Oh, it's no use looking for somebody to blame for an easy way out.

  • Ah, better idea would be to listen to some of these students, find out what they're thinking and why the generation gap.

  • Both sides of it, uh, expound virtues, which the other side seems to be living on DDE.

  • Whether they get together or not is irrelevant.

  • The changes will happen, I think, the biggest area of hypocrisy.

  • It's probably the fact that everyone else tends to accuse the other person of being hypocritical.

  • That tends to deny it about himself.

  • Morality today consists of Do what you want as long as you're not bothering the guy next door.

  • Anything voluntary, anything consenting, for example, extra or premarital sexual relations, drugs, gambling.

  • All of these areas of traditional morality has pretty much gone to the wayside.

  • And it's simply up to the individual presently on college campuses to try to overthrow the establishment, make up their own rules to govern themselves.

  • Not too many people are interested in going to church are fungi or too much, and they take the Bible more of a myth.

  • Students are are molded and shaped into what this system decides it needs in order to keep its production at a certain level, to keep its economy at a certain level, not to be more human, but to be more productive.

  • Well, in India, the youth they are changing in the old days they like to play the highest suspect toe there, Ehlers.

  • And now they're things.

  • Well, they are.

  • They have all the rights to waive the life as the light, not saying the capitalism is banned.

  • Not saying that, you know, some type of Marxist economy is good, but just, uh, the kind of suppression and inequity that has brought about by by capitalism of the economic system.

  • It's a shook up generation.

  • Let's face some of the young people have jumped onto the revolution or a bandwagon just for the right foot kicks.

  • But a lot of them are doing some serious thinking twice therapy for anyone concerned about the status of planet Earth these days, the militancy is going to separate your society.

  • Society is gonna polarize it, black and white, radical and non radical, left and right.

  • This is gonna polarize your society so that the unity, but we're searching for is not gonna come about.

  • What would it mean then?

  • You see to kind of flip that, like Jesus did in his time to flip a whole new conception of humanness into the consciousness of people around the globe.

  • That's what the revolution is about.

  • People are just too cold to each other.

  • They don't get involved on each other's problems.

  • I think one of the big problems today with teenagers and grown ups alike is the fact that they I live next door to someone for maybe 20 years, and they really don't know this person.

  • I think what is needed is for people to stop individually and look at themselves where they're at and realize their own lack of communication with inside of themselves, with God realized that they need someone or something to help them get to God.

  • And I feel this way It's your Christ and I think within the church, also within my own Christian quote unquote community.

  • I think there's a need for rebirth there for us to get up off our cans and do something onward.

  • Christian soldiers watching Where To the supermarket, To the appliance store.

  • The life of ease.

  • Affluence.

  • Unconcerned.

  • Sure, many young people today speak out against the church in society because of the lost nous in their own souls.

  • Groping for answers, turning to drugs, sex, intellectualism, materialism.

  • Not always, though at least some of them once looked to the church to their parents.

  • Some look in vain for a song they could sing, an example to follow of faith to live by any of these kids.

  • And don't you dare forget many of them desperately want the reality of faith, but they just don't believe they could find it in the church back in the Old Testament, Amos and how he just completely wrapped down anything to do with organized religion or the institution.

  • And as far as you know, I can't see anything working in the church because it's an institution I haven't given up in many people of the church.

  • But I have in the church structure.

  • It reflects all of the problems that the total society reflects.

  • They organized church.

  • I think that there is a role for, like the underground church in America today.

  • I think it's a very progressive role, but the organized church does reflect the same oppressive conditions of the society reflects.

  • It's like a mirror.

  • I'm not against religion.

  • If that's what a person needs, church is going to die because of what it stands for.

  • I think if if Christianity was relative to this world, Christianity meant something, you know, two people besides just cut everybody down.

  • I don't want to listen to you.

  • You're a doper.

  • I don't want to listen to your freak or hippie or whatever you know.

  • The church reflect society and society has got to change for it to be meaningful, and it's not doing it.

  • Ironically, while students speak out against Christianity in North America, one finds a resurgence of traditional religions overseas.

  • Intellectual Hinduism in India, soca gunky In Japan, the trend is for young people everywhere to rethink their beliefs.

  • Liberalized the old ideas.

  • They would give ear to the Gospel if someone confronted them with it.

  • Here is the searing shame Christians have failed to communicate Christ world in revolution.

  • On any one planeload, the United States government sent more soldiers to Vietnam, and the church sent missionaries during any 10 year period.

  • The tragedy of missions today is not closed.

  • Doors there, our son.

  • To be sure, the tragedy is open doors, which we have failed to enter.

  • Open doors, open minds, hearts.

  • It's pretty obvious.

  • Young people are thinking today, their minds open, reaching out for answers.

  • Young people are idealistic as a whole.

  • They know what they want on.

  • They want it now.

  • We know what's wrong with the world in our estimation, and we think it should be changed when that structure confines that the humanist, the individual, so that it can't explode can't create.

  • That's the kind of thing that has to be changed.

  • We tend to throw away our parents idea what religion should really mean.

  • Toe, Since I'm a revolutionary, not, I think we have to return or find values of total freedom.

  • And so much is possible for each person objecting or resisting or descending.

  • That's not the revolution.

  • And yet it's the beginnings of a revolution.

  • And you know, Jesus cuts over against that by just establishing a model of transformation of humanness.

  • And that's what we're all about.

  • And that's what it's what it's got to come.

  • You know, they're looking for answers, and a few of them are finding answers.

  • The answer.

  • They're looking for vital answers, and they're not finding them in sex or dope or oh, our whatever other hang ups they might have.

  • But yet they're finding through Christ.

  • And definitely this is the answer.

  • The total ends so through God's love that we'll ever be able to ever conquer, not even begin to even, uh, sincerely find the answer to the questions that involve our problems.

  • Oh, Jesus Christ.

  • I can't think that his, uh, he's not a man.

  • He's a Lord too, You know, I believe that he's, uh he's the savior on the He can't save everybody.

  • Believing him, they've got look to something that hasn't changed in many years.

  • They must look to the relevant parts of life.

  • I think some of them should read the Bible and see that God is something that doesn't he doesn't change.

  • Here's something they could firm there, get their phone faith on something they can stand by is unchanging, and they can rest in this and get some insurance from this some stability.

  • The only hope back and say is Jesus Christ.

  • It's not the time to destroy the church, but it's to have to build the church of whether it has.

  • So we've got to get together.

  • That's not black and black with black and white.

  • We've got to be serious.

  • Got to be concerned without the personal prejudice hang ups.

  • This is really on both sides way.

  • Stop the world.

  • I want to get off.

  • Hardly as never before in almost 2000 years, Christians face inescapable responsibilities and unprecedented opportunity way.

  • Do not take a passive attitude toward our world.

  • We dare not settle for self righteous, so satisfied materialistic Christianity.

  • What you've seen and heard the last few minutes may frighten you, but these young people are more than problems.

  • They pulsate with potential.

  • Let's introduce the Christ who can give them a song to sing a purpose worth living for a cause worth dying for issues in our world or not simply Capitalism versus communism.

  • Freedom against totalitarianism Issue is spiritual.

  • Lethargy versus dynamic commitment.

  • Be part of that commitment.

  • Don't expect easy answers.

  • You can't quote a verse, whisper a prayer singer stanza, drop a dollar into the offering plate and thereby discharge your responsibility to a lost world.

  • Nor can you sit back and wait for Christian leaders to come up with the answers.

  • Reaching out to the needs of our troubled world calls for the total commitment of every true believer.

  • That means you, me.

  • We must spread the dynamic gospel of the risen Christ more aggressively than ever before, Right?

  • Let's do it.

  • Let's go.

  • Let's give, let's believe.

  • Let's be a living thrust of the answer.

  • Each of us two young people across the seed and across the street there were generation searching for reality.

  • We must rise to the mandate of our master who said you shall be witnesses un tonight unto the uttermost part of the way e that you will be and the following way leaving God and my daddy loves me and the following way I agree.

Hello, It's David Hoffman, filmmaker.

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