1968. I have been here before

I am older now. I have seen this road.

It is a bad stretch, and it will get worse.

1968

From Facebook, a comment on yesterday's blog post:

     "Peter Sage, You keep posting these Pro Pig propaganda. At some point it might be that you're not looking in the mirror anymore. You are an old white guy telling a black woman, fighting for justice, what's acceptable to say. Check your privilege, my friend. Now is not the time to spread your anti-progressive, anti-change, pro Neo-liberal attitude. Do it somewhere else."

The year 1968 was a miserable year in America. 

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Urban neighborhoods were in flames from riots. The war in Vietnam escalated, and every day we got a report of more American deaths. Politics was in turmoil. The Democratic Convention turned into a police riot on the floor of the convention hall. George Wallace drew big crowds goading Blacks and college students. The generation gap between young people with long hair and their parents in the WW2 Greatest Generation was at its height. Billboards told us to cut our hair. The draft was forcing people just like me, age 18, to go fight in an immoral war.

Actually not people just like me, which was another problem. People who could go to college, and stay there making regular progress toward a degree, could get deferments and spend the war years in classrooms and newly co-ed dormitories rather than in Vietnam. Sweet duty. It accelerated a trend that would grow large in leftist politics, a division between the liberal college educated and future-prosperous leftists, and the non-college future working person. 

1968: The news was of turmoil, daily. Like today. 

News this morning

Many young politically active people of my era thought the turmoil politically useful, that we were shocking and changing America. After all, America was complacent and only turmoil would get its attention, sometimes with direct action and maybe even those urban riots. Students forcibly occupied my university's administration building--direct action. Other protests in urban, mostly Black neighborhoods, experienced fires and looting. 

College students might have gotten a clue how we appeared to the "regular Joes" from the fact that the police forces that removed the "direct action" students from the university building were rough and angry. They did not see students as fellow fighters for economic and social justice. To them we were privileged hooligans. Some of my classmates were surprised and indignant at the rough treatment.

Didn't they understand we were the "good guys" fighting for righteous causes?  

No they didn't.

1968, The "Law and Order" election. Nixon won it, a task more difficult because George Wallace won almost ten million votes and five states, running on a blunter, rougher version of the same issues as Nixon. Between the two they won 41 million votes to Hubert Humphrey's 31 million. 

It was a wipeout for the left. 

Nixon, in his convention speech said, "As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flames. We hear sirens in the night. . . We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home." He had his issue: stop the chaos.

My generation underestimated something fifty years ago, especially when we thought that urban riots and looting were sending a useful message of frustration with an unjust status quo. We underestimated the public's appetite for order.


Joe Biden has the opportunity to be the symbol of social order. This turmoil could work to his advantage because Donald Trump is so firmly temperamentally oriented toward creating disorder. He has thrived by picking fights and throwing gasoline on political fires. He has benefited from stirring the pot. He could screw this up for himself and look like part of the problem. This could--possibly--break Biden's way, but that is not the history I remember. 

Denver responds to protest riots

What I experienced was that in an era of chaos Americans move toward a political leader who speaks of using no-nonsense blunt force. Looting and arson appear to need overwhelming strength to combat them, not parsing between peaceful protest and violence. A majority of American voters think war zones require warriors, not diplomats. Amid chaotic conditions it all looks like a war zone.

The year 1968 was a miserable year for America--mitigated for me personally by my idealism, my youth, great music, and a zeitgeist that assured me that we young people were changing the world, and everything would be great. 

It wasn't great. The protests, once they got out of control, which they quickly did, were scaring people, so they did what a majority of scared people do: they called the police.