Déjà vu sorta
It’s sorta feeling like I’m 16 again, but not in a good way. It’s starting to feel like 1968 all over again.
First, there was the Saturday night image of the bloodied candidate. Just more than a week later, Joe Biden’s letter, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to step down…”
Déjà vu … sort of.
In ’68 I was a nerdy kid in Caledonia, taking it all in courtesy of Walter Cronkite and Time Magazine. Fifty-six years later I’m a nerdy old fart taking it all in courtesy of NPR and the New York Times Online.
1968 wasn’t a particularly sweet year to be sixteen – or, for that matter, just about any other age. I was at the age when a guy like me was supposed to be focused on mastering the Minnesota Drivers Manual and parallel parking, picking up a summer job, and giving some thought to which of the local girls he had a prayer of getting lucky with after the Junior Prom.
But by the time I made it to teenagehood, the America of Gidget and Dobie Gillis was already in reruns. The Summer of Love and hippies in the Haight had also been the Long Hot Summer of riots and hate in more than 150 inner city neighborhoods set ablaze in a paroxysm of racial division. Chants of “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” gave voice to an ever-bloodier war with no discernable end or purpose in sight. It was a bad time for America.
And things were getting worse.
1968 was barely a month old when the Tet Offensive put out the “light at the end of the tunnel” for millions of Americans. It would be a year of politics punctuated by violence and gunfire. Bobby Kennedy, mortally wounded on a hotel kitchen floor short weeks after a sniper gunned down Martin Luther King outside a Memphis motel room. The president called it quits --- “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President…”-- and, in the end, the candidate who would famously declare “I am not a crook,” -- but who ultimately proved to be one -- moved into the White House.
Even so, for good or ill, life went on.
Yeah, Mark Twain said it best, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Which puts us in the second line of a particularly nasty couplet.
Which also may be cause for a bit of cautious hope.
A lot has changed since 1968. Arguably changed for the better.
If one party’s candidate is insisting that he, like his ’68 counterpart, is not a crook, his likely opponent is a black woman. A gay man, married to another gay man, sits in the Cabinet, a once and probable future, presidential contender. From the perspective of 1960s America…you couldn’t make that up. Over the past five decades, we, as a people, have gotten a lot, lot better at recognizing, respecting, and honoring our mutual humanity across race, gender, ethnicity and affectional orientation. Despite deep and real divisions, ours is a far kinder and gentler America than the one I grew up in.
Oh it’s certain we have problems galore; problems to be solved or ignored. The rich are too rich, the poor are too poor. The weather’s getting too hot and still haven’t figured out how to live together in peace. But if 1968 as a horror show, in 1969 two men landed on the moon … and came back. A sure sign that maybe there was hope for the world after all.