68

                I graduated from high school in 1968.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, watching the specials on MLK and RFK.  Fifty years- ago something changed in America – more accurately, something died.  The 60’s were turbulent, with civil rights, women’s rights and the war.  New music, new movies and a new sensibility was fueling a youth culture that was developing against a backdrop of riots and violence across a broad spectrum of society.  The fact that television had saturated the American culture meant we watched Viet Nam, Selma and the riots in LA, Newark and Detroit from a new vantage point.  There was plenty of racial violence in America before the 60’s, but TV meant we all got to see Bull Conner’s police dogs and fire hoses and the state police over the bridge in Selma.  America had been to war before, but now we watched old Cronkite crouched behind sand bags while a kid from somewhere in the heartland died on the national nightly news.

                In spite of all of the violence and turmoil, it felt like we were moving forward; it felt like we were winning.  There was a sense that America was about to leave its racist and misogynist past and become something new.  There was hope.  Dr. King was hope.  Bobby was hope.  California was hope.  Heading into 68 it felt like all those things were tugging us, reluctantly and slowly to be sure, in the right direction.  When Dr. King talked about bending the moral arch of history, I felt like I could see it on the horizon.  Some of the change was trivial. Wearing bell-bottoms and paisley shirts or growing your hair long (mine was ¾ of the way to my waist) meant nothing in the long run, but it felt like it was marking a new territory.

                In 68 the wheels came off – the empire struck back.  King and Kennedy – gone.  Nixon and Wallace on the rise.  A ‘secret’ plan to end the war.  Draft lotteries and bombing in Cambodia.  Kent State were just down the road.  The political system broke in 68.  It broke in Chicago, and it broke in November when Nixon, probably the most morally ill-equipped man to be president until Trump, rallied the ‘silent majority’ and won the presidency.  George Wallace appealed to the not so subtle racism in America and heralded the beginning of a Southern shift in American politics that catapulted racism and some virulent form of Protestant patriotism to prominence.  Nixon won following Lee Atwater’s ‘southern strategy,’ turning the old southern Democrats into Republicans.

                Somewhere in that mess we lost our hope.  Somewhere in the culture, even youth culture, we went from ‘all you need is love’ to ‘fuck you.’  I think a lot of us smugly thought that the future couldn’t possibly belong to those who so represented all that was wrong in America in the first place.  Surely, we thought, we were going to continue to expand and not contract civil rights.  Surely, we would be more tolerant and more accepting of difference and diversity.  But the powers that emerged out of the carnage of 68 weren’t ready to roll over and disappear.  Helped along by an economy that tilted toward financial wealth and away from manufacturing and union labor, the gains of the 50’s and 60’s were being erased.

                Looking back on 68 from the political circus we live in today, it seems so clear that this was inevitable.  It seems so obvious that the abnormality isn’t what has happened since 68, the abnormality is what happened before.  The struggles of the 60’s are the struggles we still face today.  We have been fragmented and distracted into thinking that we don’t need unions or public schools or even public decency.  We’ve been conned into thinking that someone else would do all the hard stuff for us.  We have allowed ourselves to believe that words written by a slave owning oligarch were intended for the rest of us.

                I think we are at a crossroads of democracy, one that has little to do with Donald J. Trump.  We have been travelling this road for a long time now.  68 may have been the high point of democracy in America, not because things were so great but because the vision was so grand.  We thought victory was inevitable.   It wasn’t.  No democracy can tolerate a distribution of wealth as out of whack as ours is.  No democracy can withstand a police mentality that makes it legal to publicly execute black men.  No democracy can survive the putrid public schools we’ve created.  If we are to finally become a democracy, then we have to face the reality that America has always been an oligarchy, a political system ruled by elites for their benefit.  I think what died in 68 was the dream that the words we have all been raised to revere are as self-evident as Jefferson said they were.