IMHO, that is more of a “yes and no” reason for Nixon’s win in '72. I’d say it had more to do with the news just days before the election that the Vietnam war was all but over.
You mean statues of traitors to the United States who fought for white supremacy and the subjugation of black Americans, that were put up long after the war was over to intimidate black people and encourage crimes against them? Yeah, the words ‘very good’ and ‘heroes’ don’t apply.
Now seems worse. It feels to me like the 24 hour news cycle has intensified division. Internet anonymity has made discourse even more uncivil. And to me, tRump projects a broader spectrum of evil than Nixon. Sorry I don’t have a better way to say it.
Maybe some good news: a broader range of people are taking ethical stands in the last week or so.Military, NASCAR, federal authorities, the SBC, citizens of all ages and races are speaking out. That gives me hope.
Did your parents inspire this fear? I was 16 during the MLK riots, and lived in Queens a lot closer to them than you were, and I felt no fear at all. No rioters came anywhere close to us.
Cool. We can replace the statue of a Confederate general with one of Benedict Arnold. One traitor is as good as another.
The OP said late '60s. Not fair to compare the traumas of an entire decade with those of a few months. Vietnam was bad - my draft lottery number was 11 - but Covid has killed more Americans than the war did.
Nobody’s mentioned the first thing to pop into my head: The late 60’s had much Optimism; there is Pessimism today. Listen to this 1971 song with the lyrics “We can change the world.” What music do kids listen to today? Gangstas shooting each other to get more hos and gold chains?
But maybe my impressions are more personal than factual. Old men react differently than teen-agers do. Anyway, I am “out of it” today, isolated here in the jungle. Then again, I was also decidedly “out of it” in 1969, though for different reasons. :smack: :eek:
:dubious: :rolleyes:
It’s pretty widely understood that these statues were never erected to memorialize “heroes” (which is an inappropriate way to describe people who took up arms against America); they were erected to intimidate, demoralize, and disenfranchise African-Americans from civic life. If you think that’s ridiculous, I’d encourage you to read this article. If you’re short on time, then just read this this excerpt:
And take a look at this chart (PDF).
The 60s felt more like there was an evil empire, like in Star Wars, and a youthful revolution working to overthrow it. Today it feels more like awful people (a few in government and many many more racist voters electing them). Also, today we have this awful climate change thing, where it is our helpless fate to get clobbered by nature (though we deserve it), which is worse and more urgent than anything else you could imagine, but then suddenly we have this awful pandemic thing, where it is our helpless fate to get clobbered by nature, which is worse and more urgent than anything else you could imagine, so bad it makes everybody forget climate change. Everything awful about the 60s was driven by the evil empire we were going to overthrow (or so it felt, because most of us didn’t understand anything about implicit bias and systemic racism and sexism etc). Today it’s more than just things awful people are doing, bad as those are.
I graduated HS in 71. The late 60s were worse and better than today. The civil and cultural disorder was much worse than today. The hope for the future was much higher.
Crucially, back then we viewed the world as a few old guard racists vs everyone else. Now the size of the two groups are far more equal. We don’t have to retire a few bad apples, we have to confront an entire half of society opposed to change.
Today, we have less hope of a useful level of change.
I will gently oppose some of this observation. The differences in public support were huge. Sixties America was 80%+ white, overwhelmingly self-identifying as Christian and center right in its political leanings. Anti-war protests were centered largely on campuses and support barely reached outside of them. Students sent home after Kent State – a few years after the sixties – were openly reviled by the public they needed to pass through in order to reach the safety of their homes.
We have a far worse form of conservatism in the country right now, a largely unpersuadable one, but the Floyd protests were perceived as just by something like 60% of the country. Even 29% of self-identified Republicans approved.
I don’t know how to address the hope issue. My hopes center around significant election reform as a means of making a better democracy and those hopes seem to be forever stalemated. But I think our hopes of having a nation with better racial understanding and equality remain strong. We just have a lot of work to do.
Note: born 1953.
Although Thelmalou said it very well, it’s impossible to convey how much the constant news coverage has changed perceptions and viewing habits of people today.
For a thought experiment, imagine the following: Terrorist bombings occur, on average, 5 times per day, every day, for the next 18 months. What would the reaction of news outlets be in this case? Imagine the sheer volume of constant in-our-face videos, pictures, commentary, warnings, threat levels and unending youtube narcissists advising us on safety. It would fill every screen, every hour of every day and you could not escape it.
Well, that’s what actually happened between 1969 and 1971. FBI reported 2500 bombings on American soil in 18 months. An average of almost 5 a day. Most people were “Meh, another day, another bomb.” The difference was the lack of news reporters fighting for consumer eyeballs every minute of our existence. We barely paid attention to them.
I graduated high school in 1972. Have to say I was fairly oblivious. Sure I saw the news on TV and there were kids in class who talked about protesting the war but I was in my own little world and all that stuff just didn’t register.
However, I did experience the unrest in person on a senior class field trip to San Francisco. The school bused us up to the city and let us go for the day. There was a huge protest in Union Square, my buddy and I went over to check it out. Right about the time we showed up the police arrived in force (on foot, motorcycles and on horseback) and started to disperse the crowd. That’s when all hell broke loose.
Most of the crowd was not inclined to move, so the police formed a line across Powell Ave and started marching. In the resulting fray, billy clubs were brought to bear, motorcycles were knocked over and one of the police horses keeled over and died. We got caught up in a group of protesters being chased up the street; people were being whacked right behind us. We ducked into the lobby of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and were immediately told to leave. Luckily the skirmish had moved up the street and we were able to continue our excursion without further drama.
There were also the lack of consequences:
Even now, the news media get tired of a subject and are ready to move on after a while. The coronavirus is still killing ~800 Americans each day, but it’s moving off the front pages.
Five bombings a day at disparate places in the U.S. that were more akin to acts of vandalism than threats to life and limb would stay at the top of the news for maybe a week or two at the outside, assuming they got there in the first place.
Well, except for Fox News and the rest of the right-wing noise machine. There, assuming the bombings were coming from the left rather, they’d be a huge ongoing story. Of course, these days, such a wave of attacks would be coming from the right, so they’d be ignored on Fox.
There’s less outward turbulence now, even after the events of the past three weeks. Thinking back to the riots after MLK’s assassination, or the protests after Cambodia/Kent State, neither of these were nearly as much of an outlier in that era as the nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are in ours.
But you’re right about the sense that the structure itself is in danger right now. That really wasn’t a factor for most Americans in the late 1960s.
And also we were all getting our news from the same sources. People could argue about what the news meant, and what we should do about what was happening. But we were at least arguing from the same set of facts back then. There really weren’t any meaningful platforms for creation of an alternate reality in which busloads of Antifa terrorists are invading the suburbs or small towns.
And the existence of those platforms nowadays has resulted in a deep schism in American life, between the people who are in the reality we know, and those who are in the Fox/OANN reality. This schism is what made a demagogue like Trump possible here, and it’s why the Democrats can’t assume that they’ll be able to meaningfully negotiate with Republicans: the GOP base is immersed in that alternate reality and its implications, and GOP legislators open to compromise will get primaried and probably lose.
Our political system works (or worked) as long as there is/was a coherent middle ground for compromise within a structure that was accepted by both sides. But now, the parties’ first principles are divergent, and there’s no real middle ground. In the immortal words of John Cole:
He wrote that in February 2009. And those were the Good Old Days, compared to now.
Yes. To me this is THE most consequential difference between then and now. The two major sides (not to mention the various other “sides”) don’t agree on what is true. I don’t mean The One True Thing-- I mean they don’t agree even on a *range *of truth. And those who decide to lie comprise an entire spectrum from simple denial (flat-earth types) to groups/individuals who make up entire events and realities and then create documents, pictures, and films to support their lies. Don’t bother asking for cites-- you’ve all seen them. Yeah, this was done in the past, too, but now there is a vehicle–the internet-- for instantly spreading the lies all over the world.
Beam me up, Scottie. I’m done.
I was in my late teens in the late 60’s.
We were expecting nuclear war at any moment, however. And yes, some people were expecting ecological disaster; just not the specific one bearing down on us now.
It was a really odd mix of hopefulness and expectation of disaster.
I am seeing some of a very similar mix now, though. Maybe it’s how humans often tend to react to trouble?
Both parts of this.
The information we were all getting wasn’t all facts; and some of what was accurate on the surface included, in effect, lies by omission. But none of the major news sources were deliberately trying to present lies; and just about everybody was watching/reading/listening to at least some of those sources. So the arguments were mostly about what to do about the same things, not about what reality was.