“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the United States is coming apart at the seams almost as severely as we did leading up the the Civil War, and I’m old enough to remember 1968!
“I fear that it’s inevitable for our country to descend into some sort of dictatorship-cum-pseudodemocracy like has been seen in places such as the Philippines. Have we passed the point where there’s no turning back?”
This question is from a Washington Post chat last week with columnist Jennifer Rubin.
And while I agree with the premise about the country coming apart at the seams, I think the reference to 1968 is wishful thinking.
While 1968 was indeed an amazing year, it had a far greater effect in Western Europe than it did in this country.
Especially in France.
My wife Nicole and I didn’t meet until 1992, but we were both 18 in 1968, Nicole in Toulouse and me in Virginia.
People here remember the King and Kennedy assassinations and the riots in Chicago, but what they conveniently forget is how few people other than college students were involved in protesting.. In fact, at that point the anti-war crowd was a minority of even college students.
It wasn’t until a year later with Woodstock in August and the two massive demonstrations in Washington in October and November that things really started cooking.
But in the spring of 1968, French students nearly took over the country. In fact, they had enough sympathy from working people that they actually shut things down with a general strike.
By comparison, we were America the pitiful.
Part of the problem is that we bought way too far into history that just wasn’t true. We have allowed those in power to suppress so much about our history that doesn’t fit our image of U-S-A, U-S-A.
When I think of all the things we never learned in school when I was growing up in Eisenhower America, it’s truly appalling.
We learned about the Bataan Death March, but not the Trail of Tears.
We learned a lot about the Holocaust, but very little about the lives we could have saved except for the fact we refused to let European Jews immigrate here when Hitler was still allowing them to leave.
No one told us about the Bonus Army in 1932 and the attempted overthrow of Franklin Roosevelt by Wall Street types in his first term. In fact, I never heard of Gen. Smedley Butler, a real hero, until I was in my 40s. But oh boy, did we hear how amazing Dugout Doug MacArthur was.
The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was truly horrific, but I would wager most of us never heard of it till the last few years.
When I was in school in the late ’50s and into the ’60s, one thing our teachers always told us was that the reason we opposed communist countries was that communism was imposed on the people.
If people voted to be communists, our teachers said, that would be fine with us.
Then Chilean voters elected a Marxist, Salvador Allende, is a free and fair election in 1972.
So we killed him.
So much for free and fair elections.
In fact, all through the Cold War years, we supported some of the worst dictators in the world because they were anti-communist.
We never came close to coming apart at the seams, and if we are now, it’s because the people who were always pretty much satisfied with the status quo have gotten angry.
“The peasants are revolting!”
“You said it. They stink on ice.”
Yes, Mel Brooks said it best.
The problem is that most of the people who seem to want a civil war aren’t looking to move ahead to a better world. Most of them want to take things back to good old days that were never really that good.
I don’t think we’re at a point where there’s no turning back.
But I do think we’re closer than we’ve ever been.
And that is scary.