1968 - who was around?

[RPM]

As a child, my mother told me that the scariest time in her life was 1968. She would tell of how the nation seemed to be on the verge of a total meltdown. In light of the events of that year, its not hard to see how and why.

My question to those around for that year is: How does 2005 stack up to 1968 as far as the feeling of pending national crisis? Things have been bizarre for the last 4 years, but seem to be in high-speed in the last 3 months. The last week especially so. But is this even close to 1968?

Your thoughts please...

[seabeyond]

1. i was 7 and living the carefree life...............

of a 7 year old

[jeanarrett]

144. Me too! 7 years old, and riding my bike, playing baseball with my

brothers and building forts in the woods - oh, I played with my dolls some too - and wondering why I couldn't run around with my shirt off like the boys. It was a good year for me.

[Blue_Roses]

175. me too!

didn't have a care in the world. miss those days.

[mike_c]

2. I was 13 and watched the Democratic Convention on television....

It was the first time I remember feeling political outrage. I had a wholly inarticulate argument with my father about it.

[Catshrink]

52. I remember watching the protests with my dad

and screaming watching the Chicago cops beat the protesters. Daddy why???? I was outraged -- and 13.

[jdj]

3. I was here from August on....

and I know that year affected me even though I spent most of it in the womb.

[BigMcLargehuge]

4. I was around

I was a round little egg in my mom's belly

[ashling]

5. 68 was pretty rough,

what with Vietr Nam, two assasinations, riots, et al,
but this is worse

[RPM]

8. how, why is this worse?

I know the history, but i need a description of the gut feeling of the time.

my gut is bad right now - but i need a frame of reference.

edited for spelling

[jojo54]

34. * is insane

I don't think that Johnson was, or even Nixon when he took office in Nov. But what do I know, I was only 13.

Bush ACTUALLY thinks he's doing the right thing, he's delusional and that's the scary part.

[xpat]

74. My gut feeling was good in 68

We on the left were winning against the warmongers, even though the war continued for some years, we knew we had them on the run.

Today, I wake up with fear in the pit of my stomach. This is scary shit. We weren't in fear of a fascist takeover in 68.

[RPM]

84. guh

:scared:

[zanne]

102. I felt the same way, xpat.

We had a youth movement back then. The times were bad, but the future looked rosy. We were sure that once we were in charge, the world would change for the better. (Then we got married, had kids and suddenly felt a need to amass large sums of money).

[Steel City Slim]

150. A Feeling Of Hope

I was 20 in 1968, and despite the assassinations and the war, there was still a feeling of hope. The young people were united in their efforts to change the status quo, to end racism, to halt the blind acceptance of what the government told us, to build a better world. It's kind of hard to describe, I know it sounds like a cop out, but you had to be there. It was like nothing else I've experienced before or since. The closest I can come to as an example is a warm, sunny spring day after a long, hard, cold winter.

[BikeWriter]

I think I'd have to agree, and I was in Nam at the time.

[babylonsister]

6. I was 12 and all was right with the world.

That's why I feel for kids today. All isn't right with the world, but do they know it? Should they?

[DearAbby]

13. I agree this is worse ...I remember 68.

It was bad with Bobby Kennedy was killed and MLK. The War and Convention. But you had a sense that it was for love of country. They didn't want to destroy it.

These people seem intent on destroying this country, creating a Christian Taliban. It's really got me concerned.

[babylonsister]

21. So true! What's even sicker is we have a war raging

and nobody is acknowledging this fact. It's all a big flippin' distraction from so many other issues. Yes, love of country, I'm not feeling it at all.

[murielm99]

37. Love of country, yes.

No matter what side people were on, there was love of country.

We were raised to love our country. So were our parents, who were products of the Depression and WWII. We were raised to be citizens rather than consumers.

[latteromden]

96. We know it. I'm afraid for the younger kids, though, who have no

previous experience with government other than the Bush administration - I (unfortunately) caught both Bushes in office, but thankfully, Clinton as well. I'm afraid that kids will think that this is the way government always is, and that's not good at all.

[dog_lovin_dem]

7. I turned 10 in December of 1968.

What I recall of that time period is the pictures of the war and the protests on tv all of the time. It seemed "normal" to me at the time. I also remember my mom's fear of my brother being drafted and the feelings of tension when the numbers were read.

[ultraist]

33. I remember the war shots on tv too

I was four but I vividly remember those war photos on tv and in magazines and how scary they were. Learning about the horrors of our country, at that impressionable age, most certainly had an influence on my worldview. I have never trusted our government.

I think we are in as bad of a state as we were then, as a country. There is a lot of division and distrust of our government. It's definitely not a Reagan era or Clinton era and worse than Bush I or Bush II's first term.

[5thGenDemocrat]

9. I was 12

And far more tuned into the Detroit Tigers winning the pennant and the World Series. I was also more than a bit of a hawk on the war (too many Sergeant Fury and the Howlin' Commandos comix, I suspect). I did admire those who were out on the streets raising hell, especially my mom (4thGenDem) -- who marched for civil rights, against Vietnam and generally made a nuisance of herself. Good for her!
John
Who still went into the Army three months after turning 17. I'm a lot more liberal now. Mom would be proud.

[RPM]

15. that tigers WS win was the only good thing for detroit that year

part of my impression of 68 is shaped by the fact that my mother lived and taught in Detroit (Davi(d)son elementary) at the time...

[babylonsister]

30. Mom rocked, and thanks, John!

So many lessons that haven't been learned, eh?
My family was into the Joe Namath and the NY Jets, or at least close to that year.

[RamboLiberal]

10. I don't think this year is any where close to 1968

2001 was probably the closest to the craziness of 68. 68 saw the Tet Offensive, assasination of MLK and RFK, riots in the cities, riot at Democratic convention in Chicago, Nixon wins election, etc.

Only thing lacking was talk radio and cable to stir things even further.

BTW, I was 16 in 68.

[pauliedangerously]

61. Hey Rambo!

I don't post a WHOLE lot, but I've seen you around and I like your attitude. The sig line rocks!!

[kentuck]

11. I thought they were protesting for me???

Because I was in Vietnam for that year....

[Ironpost]

100. They were protesting for you, I arrived in country in june '69

[Redneck Socialist]

12. Yeah, it was a bad year. My teeth were coming in.

according to my mother I was a real pain in the ass.

Sorry, I don't mean to be flip (well, wait a minute, yes I do) I was pretty young at the time so I can't really say how it compares, but 2005 has been pretty sucky for me so far. x(

[Tess49]

14. I was around. In college. Protesting the war.

I remember those times fondly. You just had to be there.

[Ironpost]

101. Thanks Tess

It was people like you who got there attention and ultimately stopped the war. Thanks

[DianeG5385]

16. I was 13 and here's my memory (not good)

I was in the 7th grade and that year, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. We had riots in Detroit. We had the riotous Democratic convention with the Chicago 7. I lived in Marin and San Francisco was on fire both musically and politically. There was Vietnam..while it did seem the world was spinning out of control, I never doubted that we, the people were in charge. There was an amazing vitality and hopeful vision for change and it happened. We had an amazing and progressive educational system that actually taught us stuff. That's what makes 2005 so different, we have been co-opted and silenced, dumbed down and threatened by the powers that be. In 1968 the people were the moving force for change. In 2005 we have been marginalized, lied to and ignored, not to mention threatened and ridiculed. It's so much worse and so much more dangerous for our democracy today.

[Mojorabbit]

39. You are exactly right

There was hope for change in the air. It was electric. Power was with the people.
Now is different. People are cowed. Dark times.

[ultraist]

42. Well said.

During that era, our gov was doing horrific things but the people had some power. I agree, we have been very disempowered. That does make it even worse.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

48. You are completely on target!

Especially considering you were 13 at that time! Very acute observations, IMHO. The vitality and hopeful vision for change was one of the really acute differences between then and now. This is a much darker day. I am truly scared for our country, and our people.

[KarenS]

97. I agree with you,,,, I was 18 in 1968,,,,,,

I think 2005 is worse,,,,

all of what you say is true.

Plus:
I hated Viet Nam,,,,, every night there was War footage on the evening news ~ EVERY NIGHT!! It was so hard to watch,,,, but, dang, this Sanitized War coverage makes it worse.

I don't think there were these made-up crises either,,,,

Folks then were truly divided, not orchestrated divisions.

Back then, it was more young folks against old,,,, Not, religious zealots trying to take over the country.

[ngGale]

151. The saying was, " don't trust anyone over 30" if...

I remember correctly. It was young against old but there was love of country. The whole movement was about love - we thought that could solve anything. Now we know better! There is more hate than love now and the right keep breeding more. It's truly depressing to see this country going back wards. It's even more depressing to be approaching the end of your life the same way you came into it. Seems we accomplished nothing yet we keep fighting with what we have left.
I don't remember having this fear or lack of hope. In fact, just the opposite. Our only fear was being drafted.

[July]

109. I was 14, and my memory is much like yours.

There was highly charged rhetoric, as there is now, but more sincerity on both sides, I think. I try to tell my kids about the belief that the world really would change through the efforts of the people -- doesn't that sound incredible now? Who has that belief today. The war, the assassinations, the riots were more real to all of us than today's wars and violence, but we still had great hopes. Things really were changing for women, blacks, and gays, and when they weren't changing people were talking about needed change. On top of that we had the sexual revolution, really new clothes and hairstyles, great music. For a young teen, it was an exciting time in every sense, and a time that demanded that one think about one's stand on the issues of war, abortion, feminism, etc. Oh, and the media had more independence and seriousness then.

I agree with the poster who said that people threw the word "fascism" around quite a bit, and rather loosely. I've never used the term to describe our government until now. Watching the suppression of the mildest dissent, along with the screened propaganda shows, I feel that the power of the people that we witnessed in the sixties could never be expressed today. I hope I'm wrong, though.

[Gloria]

17. I was a freshman in College, and that spring of 69 black students

took over the student union with guns. I remember we all stayed in the dorms. The press went nuts and talked "fornicating in the aisles" of Barton Hall. (This was Cornell, by the way).

I remember anti-war marches on the campus. Everyone was politically involved. You had to be. All your male friends had draft numbers. It was a very intense time.

I feel the same intensity now, personally, but unfortunately, it's not out there among the general public. I guess we need a draft to get people really pissed. It all has to be personal. Maybe that's why the Schiavo case is getting people riled....people look at their spouses and family and say "Hey, I don't want the gov. telling me what to do."

[Frances]

18. My thoughts

1968:

Good News: Progress had been made as far as Civil Rights; also the War on Poverty had created Head Start and some other good programs; Federal student loans were allowing students to go to college who would not have been able to do so otherwise

Bad News: Assassinations we were dealing with: John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and others

More Bad News: More and more body bags were coming back from Vietnam

And More Bad News: Johnson, who did a great deal for Civil Rights and for lower income whites and African Americans, was responsible for the build up of the war in Vietnam, and he was a Democrat

It was a tough time, but I personally am much more discouraged today than I was then. Then I thought that the country could get back to where it was before the build up in Vietnam. I thought that we were in a rough spot and things would get better fairly soon.

Today it's not just the war in Iraq that is troubling. It is the fact that our whole democratic system may crumble.

[ultraist]

50. Yes, there were some beautiful things happening then

despite the tragedies. We don't have that now. There is no real progressive movement. It was "the people" who were making changes despite the gov. My parents were somewhat involved with that whole culture and it was a culture. I thought activists, hippies and artists were very cool, the good guys. ;)

We don't really have that now. We have a commercialized, big corp controlled government as well as MSM.

[mandyky]

19. I was 13 and the morning RFK was killed

I thought it was all a bad dream, because I heard the radio while my Dad was getting ready for work (early) and then fell back asleep. When I awoke and another Kennedy was dead, I began to wonder.

I was too young to really be politcal then butit was a scary time, but the music was good.

[shanti]

41. ah yes, the music, my favorite memory of that time!! i was 13 as well...

flower power and all....but i dimly remember vietnam, nixon, politics, as most kids, even nowadays are apathetic. politics bored me and did until the stolen election in 2000. THAT was my turning point, and i ain't going back!

it's good to see the youth on DU tho!

[KaliTracy]

20. I was 3. My mother wrote letters instead of going out to protest the war

(she was pregnant at the time). She just sent me this funny today --

"The government today announced that it is changing its emblem from an
Eagle to a CONDOM because it more accurately reflects the government's
political stance.

A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next
generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of
security while you're actually being screwed.

Damn, it just doesn't get more accurate than that."

[Radio_Lady]

22. I was married and pregnant with my daughter in 1968...

My husband and I lived in New York City. While I recall being very upset with the state of politics in the world, and the war in Vietnam was raging. You could have felt worse about the casualties in Vietnam, where we eventually lost 58,000. However, in terms of the government and the economy, the current situation feels much, much worse. It's worth noting that while Republican Nixon replaced Democrat Johnson, Nixon was really a moderate! If you take away Watergate scandal, and you look at his presidency, Nixon was actually a pretty good president. He had that one major failing (sort of like Clinton with Monica Lewinsky). Johnson may have gotten trapped by the Vietnam war, but Johnson was really pained by it. What we have today that we did not have at that time was the "neo-conservative" movement in government that is trying to turn government inside-out in order to remake it to their own vision.

One of the big differences is that people believed the news they were receiving through TV, radio and newspapers. There was no Internet and I believe there was more trust and decency. And things do seem to move at an extremely fast pace.

I can tell you now that I'm in my mid-sixties -- I've never felt so sad and hopeless -- and helpless -- about government as I do now.

[RPM]

29. i have been saying the same thing about nixon lately

as far as repubs go, he is looking pretty good these days - watergate notwithstanding.

that being said, i believe that GHWB helped bring nixon down - too cozy with the chinese and not supportive enough of the military-industrial complex.

the major steps in the coup to get to where we are today have been:
1. JFK assination
2. Nixon impeachment
3. Reagan assination attempt
4. 2000 Vote
5. 2004 Vote

and they all have GHWB's hands in them.

[Robeson]

79. I agree with your 5 points and you assesment.....

...it all goes back to 1963. That coup, was the beginning of the end of this Republic. All those events, are interrelated from that point forward....

[NMDemDist2]

83. GHWBush was involved in most of the things on your list

coincidence?

[Virginian]

121. You left out the assassination of Bobby

If Bobby had been the Dem candidate in 1968, I think he would have won. I don't know if Nixon would have even considered being a candidate against another Kennedy. There would have been no Watergate, no resignation...

I think that June day had a very big influence on the history of our nation. I think it was a pivotal point.

I had a lot of hope in those days, then Bobby was gone and then Nixon was elected and I dropped out of politics. In those days the right wing couldn't suppress us, so they shot us. (I don't think Sirhan Sirhan acted alone.)

[Eloriel]

128. You're almost right

I consider the "pivotal point" just a few years earlier, with the assassination of JFK, which THEY GOT AWAY WITH with the complicity and enabling of members of our very own government! That emboldened them mightily.

That was IMO one of the last times we had the opportunity to bring these forces down. The other last time was Iran-Contra.

[Virginian]

147. I was only 12 when they shot JFK

I was devastated. I had really bought in to Camelot. I collected magazines and books on the first family. I read anything I could get my hands on. I poured over the Washington Star and Washington Post, Look and Life magazines for all the pictures and news articles on them. I was a Kennedy groupie from afar.

I believed the Warren commission. I was naive and thought that adults were all mature, responsible people. I believed that they took their jobs seriously and would only tell us the truth.

When Teddy was in the plane crash, I carried my transistor radio around with me and checked the news every hour on the hour to hear any news on his condition.

I liked JFK the best, but I was gung ho on Bobby getting the nomination and going on to pick up where his brother had left off. I was going to be in that crowd on the mall for Bobby's inauguration. The future looked great!

And then he was gone.

All wasn't lost, there was still Teddy. He could pick up the pieces of my shattered dreams.
I don't know what happened. I don't believe the "official" story of Chappaquiddic. I never have. I came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories in my head that I never told anyone. Most of them involved someone slipping him a "Micky" that night. Some of them involved threats on his children's lives if he told the truth. The official story didn't fit in my head.
I knew that was the end of my hopes for another Kennedy as President.

I ignored politics after that. I voted, but I really didn't know much about the men I voted for. I started paying attention again when I noticed how mean the Republicans were being to Bill Clinton.

Congress wasn't all that great when the Dems were in the majority, but they were never as mean as schoolyard bullies like these Republicans are.

[bobbieinok]

75. IMO, many of us who young adults in 68 agree with you

"I can tell you now that I'm in my mid-sixties -- I've never felt so sad and hopeless -- and helpless -- about government as I do now."

I think part of it is being old(er)....we just are NOT as physically and perhaps emotionally and intellectually as resilient

AND.....IT'S SO SICKENING THAT ALL WE FOUGHT FOR HAS BEEN NEARLY TOTALLY TRASHED......it all has to be redone ..... and we're tired

[Eloriel]

127. At age 57 I feel the same way:

I've never felt so sad and hopeless -- and helpless -- about government as I do now.


I personally believe that the U.S. is starting a major decline from which it may not recover (and that's not even figuring in Peak Oil or Global Warming). I felt very strongly in the lead up to the Iraq War that it was SUCH a bad move that "we might not survive as a nation" if we did it. Now there are plenty of other indicators to me that we are facing such a decline, including our massive deficit and debt.

However, in the past couple of weeks there's a difference: I now begin to believe, with enormous sadness, that the decline of the U.S. as a super power (and maybe even as a nation) is necessary -- that the welfare of the rest of the world and the planet may require it. I of course would NEVER do ANYthing to precipitate that decline, but then I don't have to, do I? Our "leaders" have seen to that.

Along with the enormous sadness there's also a sense of gratitude that I got to see and live thorugh the heydey, the period when the U.S. was at the height of its power and the nation and its citizens enjoyed the most prosperity the world has ever seen (nevermind at whose expense that prosperity was achieved).

The technological advances alone have been breathtaking. I've so often thought to myself what I would have thought of laptop computers when I was, oh, 12, in 1959 or 1960 (and always, always such a "student") -- this incredible little box that you could take with you wherever you went, smaller than a folded newspaper, capable of connecting you to the whole wide world, nearly instantly, just as soon as you flip open the cover and press a button; connecting you to a source of knolwege, information and data the likes of which the world has never known, a "virtual library" that rivals and probably exceeds the library at Alexandria. Blows me away to think about it.

[Desertrose]

171. I have to agree with you Eloriel...there was HOPE then....

I'm so sorry to say that these times are much different than '68...there was an undercurrent of excitement and the possibilities for great change...so much good stuff ahead....

We really did have hope then...and although now even though we have all that rotten history and sorry ass stupidity behind us (Nam,Watergate,gas crisis, ME mess and now 2 stolen elections -I'm sure I forgot some major stuff)...WE OBVIOUSLY HAVE NOT LEARNED what we needed to cause we seem to be going backwards down the hill picking us speed every minute.

The biggest difference back in '68...in addition to HOPE, we had a feeling of POWER that WE (the ones who wanted a peaceful change in the world) could make a difference. I feel thats all been taken away from us but most are not aware of it yet.....they are buying into the same stupid promises,lies and illusions that got us in this mess in the first place

"However, in the past couple of weeks there's a difference: I now begin to believe, with enormous sadness, that the decline of the U.S. as a super power (and maybe even as a nation) is necessary -- that the welfare of the rest of the world and the planet may require it...."

I think you have an excellent perspective here El, and I sadly agree with it 100%.

[bemildred]

23. I was 23, there was violence in the streets, riots, you name it.

This is just warming up.

[sandnsea]

24. I was 11, I didn't know any different

We grew up with that stuff. There was no "normal" to compare it to really. Looking back, I don't feel like the government was ready to go over the cliff like I do now. The tension was moving the country in a positive direction. There wasn't the threat of moving into fascist theocracy on the other side of the protests and peace movement. So that's definitely different.

[Chipper Chat]

25. I was a school teacher in the summer of '68.

The night Robert Kennedy was asassinated some of my students came to see me. They were very upset-some crying (boys too). They felt the world was falling apart, talked about the Kennedy curse, and worried about Arab-American relations taking a hit. I cant see today's high school students even caring about this stuff. As long as Daddy Bush keeps MTV on the air, allows McDonalds on every corner, and protects them from Osama and gays they are happy.

[oldlady]

62. I can understand

why you would feel that way about today's youth-- but, I think that's partly a media representation and the fact that many of today's youth feel more hopeless than youth did in the 60s (I was a youth then, myself).

I work in afterschool with kids of all ages & the teens I know well are terrified-- draft, violence, environment, space wars, cia, drugs, gangs-- they are pretty hard-core conspiracy theorists & they just feel hopeless and helpless. They don't have any faith that their voices would matter, or that change could occur. Why should they feel differently? They've been the targets of lock-downs in their schools all their lives (this is a diverse, low-income group). I think the difference is they don't believe in the democracy we grew up believing in-- if you say to them "government by the people and for the people" they'll say: "yeah, right-- and talk about Panama and the CIA introducing drugs into LA. We were pretty naiive in the 60s and it was a blessing. I know a boy, just 20, who recently completed police training and he's obsessed with prison planet and the franklin cover-up and bohemian grove... I don't know how he's going to fit in with the degree he just earned...they also think we're at the end of the world-- but not expecting a rapture.

These kids go to protests, but find them puny and don't come away feeling powerful, just sad and mad. I really feel for them and miss the 60s idealists!

peace

[RPM]

183. yeah- lord and protector GWB

i imagine that's the phrase we hear when told there will be no 2008 election

[murielm99]

26. I was twenty then.

It was a very scary time. There was a culture war of sorts, between the counterculture and the older people. There was racial violence, protest, assassination, and of course, Nam.

Everything did seem like it was about to melt down. Something violent seemed to happen every day.

I think it is much worse now. We have one party rule. We have lost the media. And no one is really doing anything effective to counter this. We are on the verge of something. An incident, or a combination of incidents, could lead to meltdown. But it is going to take more now to trigger that than it did in 1968.

I think we will need some confrontations that cannot be swept under the rug before things will begin to swing back. I don't look forward to any domestic violence, but maybe that is what it will take to get people to question the status quo. I don't think the violence will come from our side, either. But we are going to have to be prepared to defend ourselves.

[Oeditpus Rex]

27. April 4, 1968

My 12th birthday.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

Pretty much wiped out any memories of the party.

I didn't know much about Dr. King at the time, but I knew what he was doing was very, very good — and that his death was very, very bad.

Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was killed.

It's awful when you're 12 and you think the world is coming apart.

(Ain't so hot at 48, either.)

[Danmel]

113. April 4 my birthday too

I was 8 that day. I remember it very well. The small progressive Jewish Day School I attended in Brooklyn closed for 2 days and we had a Memorial service for Dr. King when we returned to school. That was a hell of year- the Democratic convention in Chicago, the King and Kennedy assassinations ( I remember that too- I remember that not too long before he died, there was a LIFE magazine cover of Bobby Kennedy walking on the beach with a dog)., the Prague spring, Nixon's election- I remember my mother making me turn off the TV set about 1 in the morning because in those non- computer days, the election results took all night to come in (I was always a weirdly political kid)

I think these times are so scary because of the religious right and the post 9-11 mindset and the real danger that we will lose the core essence of what America is supposed to be. The undermining of our civil liberties and constitutional rights on everything from privacy, to abortion, to search nd seizure to free speech and separation of Church and state seem so vulnerable and insecure. It seems like America is (if not already) going to become a third rate nation in terms of intelligent thought, education, tolerance and true caring of all people, regardless of race, income, orientation, religious belief (of lack thereof).Not to mention the environment, health care, education..... It frankly scares me.

I was just a child in 1968, so I can't really assess whether the times were scarier then than now. I think there is always something scary out there- but it does seem out of control right now, doesn't it?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

28. I was 24, 3 years out of the marines, in college. We had hope then.

We really believed that we could change the world. To borrow a phrase:
"It was the best of times and the worst of times." It was frightening and exhilirating.

Now, it just seems oppressive and stifling.

As John Steinbeck said around that time to Russian students: "Young wolves, show us your teeth." Where are the young wolves of today.

[Eloriel]

129. Exactly right: Exhilerating versus oppressive and stifling

and I'll add: UBIQUITOUSLY oppressive and stifling these days. I see so little that gives me any sense of hope. Every day, there's another "win" for them, one way or another.

[pamela]

31. I was just a kid but I loved Bobby Kennedy.

I remember vividly when he died. I don't think I was scared though, just terribly sad.

I just bought Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968. Even though I was really little, '68 and '69 are both years that really stand out in my mind. For all the awful stuff that was happening, there were some really cool things going on, too. It felt like the world was going from black and white to color.

[Up2Late]

32. 1968 was AWESOME! of coarse I was only 4

Now about 2005, You ain't seen Nothin' yet, it only going to get MUCH worst.

[Jack Rabbit]

35. I was in high school

I thought 1967 was worse. The Vietnam War kept right on going and LBJ wasn't listening to anybody or anything. It was beginning to look like the alternative was . . . Richard Nixon, who was even worse.

At the end of the year Senator Gene McCarthy declared he would challenge LBJ as a peace candidate in some early primaries. No one gave him much of a chance; but, as they say, the rest is history.

I might compare 2005 more to that atmosphere in 1967. The occupation in Iraq shows no sign of ending; not because it shouldn't, but because fearless leader is too boneheaded to admit he's made a mistake.

[MassLiberal]

36. I was 8 but I remember

MLK's and RFK's assassinations and the antiwar protests. We watched the news a lot at my house, so I saw the war on TV every night. The only thing that seemed scary and unsettling to me was RFK's assassination, but that's probably because I knew who he was and knew my parents loved him. I didn't really have a context for everything else that was going on, so I can't say that it seemed as scary to me as 2005 seems. But I think my own kids, young as they are, might be pretty aware of how weird things are right now.

[gratefull4u]

38. I was there

I was young, in high school but very aware and involved in the social movements. To me, it was a time of division but at the same time a period where you could feel the Nation changing. One by one people began to see the war for what it was, women were coming out of their bag "and bras" in droves. There was a feeling of hope that social ills could be fixed in some manor. I do not know if it was my youth that caused me to feel such electricity in the air but I experienced a profound sense of hope. I watched as my conservative father question the government and turn against the war. My boyfriends father, who was a "flag waver" take his flag down and join his son in a anti war rally. My feeling about 68 is very opposite of what I feel now. With the news media being taken over and the good guys loosing almost all power, I feel nothing but despair, I hope I am wrong.

[OneBlueSky]

40. two big differences between now and 1968 . . .

first, in 1968 everyone understood and accepted the rules . . . you couldn't just snatch someone and lock them away forever without judicial review, you couldn't wiretap without cause and a warrant, we respected the international treaties we had signed, etc. . . today, the administration feels free to break any of the rules they wish at will, and the Congress enables them with atrocities like the Patriot Act . . .

second, in 1968 we were sure we would win . . . eventually . . . today, there's no such feeling, primarily because there are no longer any rules . . .

[Karenina]

104. BINGO!!!

It's like Fellini and Dali on bad acid collaborating in a production of "Rhinoceros." :scared: :scared: :scared:
I was "in the streets" then but am REALLY FREAKED at what I'm seeing now. It's bizarre, scary and DEADLY...

[The Stranger]

107. Then we start at the beginning.

Get rid of these "laws" that would not pass five hundred years ago, much less in 1968.

Dismantle systematically the Patriot Act on every front -- local, national, in the libraries, in the legislatures, the town halls, eventually the Congress.

[Sydnie]

43. For me anyway, it feels very different this time around

In the 60's, especially the late 60's, you could fairly easily tell which side of the arguement an individual was on, either by their dress, their age, and/or what area of town they were most comfortable in. This is very different. There are no cities aflame, no "gun fights" dropping peaceful protestors in their tracks. Even the spirituality is owned by the other side this time, which was not the case in the 60's.

This time, it's a silent menace. It's the folks that attend church every Sunday, the bankers that hold the mortage to your home, the elected officials that are looking more to the opportunities that will be available AFTER they get out of office rather than the opportunity that holding office itself brings.

There was a media that would not only talk about the issues of the day, but would challenge the "authority" to defend their actions in public. News was something that made you think, rather than something that attempted to do your thinking for you.

It was a painful time but in an progressive way -- we, as a country were experiencing growing pains where empathy and world effect awareness were concerned. We had lost three great leaders in a short time period and the frustration of all that spilled out into the streets.

As painful as it all was, it was also uplifting.

It was the only time I can ever remember my very democrat/liberal father had a loaded gun in the house.

I do remember one night in particular though... oddly enough .. in '68. I was sitting on the toilet, alone in the house, when I heard the distinct sound of glass breaking. I was sure that the glass had been broken in a window in my house and that someone was attempting to enter the house. I gathered my wits and quickly exited the house for a neighbors house. As it turned out, the glass was broken miles away during a small but violent clash. Not larger enough really to call it a riot as we knew them in those days, but the papers did call it that all the same. There was so many windows being smashed that I heard it that far away.

There was strength in numbers in those days as well. Protest marches easily drew crowds from both sides, but crowds all the same. These days, most people are too busy or too poor to be able to afford to "take to the streets". If we could only do that, I think we could break the mental constipation and get down to talking about real things that matter again, things that effect us all as a society rather than the crap of "my god is better than your god" shit we seem to be dealing with these days.

But that's just my take on it.

[Individualist]

131. Agreed, very different

You made a good point about the media. There were no imbedded troops, and journalists were free to report on what was going on regardless of topic. Under today's fascist regime, we all know freedom of the press is history. I was 25 in '68.

[LastDemocratInSC]

I was a college freshman

I was pretty well tuned into issues in those days ... who would not have been? I had a student deferment and understood that the only thing between me and a draft notice was good grades. That will make one study harder, by the way.

My feeling is that this is a much more dangerous time then then. On top of all the right-wing craziness that we've experienced in the last few years we've seen, in the past few days, the Congress pass a law that requires the Judicial branch to invade a state issue (Shiavo, of course) and review it because the Congress doesn't like what the state has concluded. This is absolutely RADICAL. Santorum even said that the Federal Judge who received the case violated the law by not conducting a full review, as Congress demanded. Separation of powers be damned; states rights be damned.

The nation is coming apart in some dangerous ways, I believe, and this is happening quietly because most people are fat, happy, and stupid. Our national government has been taken over by cultural vandals who don't care about what makes our nation unique in all time.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

44. This is scarier

1968 was the year I graduated from high school. There was a lot of strange, unprecedented stuff going on, including the Vietnam War and two assassinations (MLK and RFK) that changed American history for the worse. How I wish those two men had lived and carried out their visions!

But despite all the horror that was going on, there was still a lot of optimism in the air. We hadn't had Watergate or the oil crisis or the Iranian hostage crisis or noticeable inflation or stagflation or crippling interest rates or AIDS or the interventions in Central America or all the idiocy of the Reagan years, and relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were not too bad. The news media didn't do much fear-mongering.

We were still trying to cure poverty, and people of color, women, and gays/lesbians were challenging the established order.

I don't see any optimism these days. We've had too many gut punches over the past thirty years, and the Clinton years, which must seem like golden years to younger people, did nothing to stop the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor.

In 1968, there was hostility between some parents and some children, and between working class people and protesting college students. However, I never felt that the nation was divided into warring camps.

[kodi]

45. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity."

Dickens was right, but about 170 years off.

the thing was that the rumor of freedom, hope, and dreams fulfilled were in the air, and that type of scent has not been smelled since.

[ConsAreLiars]

59. Exactly right. Now is far worse.

The term fascism was throw around then, but it was rhetoric. There was a real chance/hope that we were bringing about a new stage in human evolution. We accomplished an enormous amount. Equal rights for all, environmental awareness, the liberation of the best aspects of human potential, these were new and to some extent these are now taken for granted as a part of what is the social norm.

But now there is a vicious and fully organized attempt to establish a dictatorship of the pseudo-fundie (they are the cannon-fodder and the facade) form of corporatism that will wipe out everything decent in our history. They (the corporatists and their lackeys) no longer wish to retain even the illusion of a social contract or "the American Dream."

We will either turn them back and drive a stake into their heart, we will smash them completely and take back our humanity, or we will all face certain doom.

[evlbstrd]

46. I was also itching to hit the barricades

but they had all fallen down by the time I had the freedom to do it.
At least there was a real political opposition then.
Are we starting to see one now?

[Liberty Belle]

47. This is far worse. A couple of lone assassins caused chaos

in '68 (or at least they seemed to be lone assassins at that time).

Now, by contrast, we've got ruthless thugs running the government, rigging elections and trying hard to control the courts as well--leaving us no easy way to remove them from power. The changes they are making to our country at every level are bone-chilling and unprecedented.

Our democracy was not at risk in '68, but it clearly is today.

[housewolf]

49. We're not there yet

I was in my first year of college in 1968, safely out of the maelstrom over in Hawaii.

1968 was a volcanic year, what with the killings of MLK and RKF and the Democratic convention. The pressure had been building for years though and they finally exploded in 1968.

I don't think we're there yet. We're not seeing people in the streets like we were then. We're not seeing people totally committed to change as then. We're not seeing huge weekly/monthly protests. We're not seeing movements of young people believing that they can affect change. We're not seeing groups committed to societal revolution willing to stand against authority.

As I see it, we're at a point where the pressure is building but it's not ready to erupt yet. Largely because many, many people in this country are still in the 911-induced traumatic stress trance, attending to their own small lives and not having the energy to attend to larger issues outside of themselves.

But someday they'll wake up. Maybe it is happening now, I'm not sure. Someday enough people will realize that their future is in jeopardy and will have the wherewithal to put aside their self-centered veg-out tools that they use to maintain their false sense of security and safety. Then we'll see some real stirrings.

It could happen fast if the administration does some really egregious. Or it could happen slowly as it has been. There's no way of predicting.

One thing is certain - and that is change is inevitable. As uncomfortable as the present it, someday today will be the past and things will be different.

[Blue_In_AK]

51. I was 21, a senior in college, in 1968...

It was a very hard time. You didn't know what sort of catastrophe was going to happen next. I had friends and relatives in Vietnam (my cousin was killed in battle that year). The assassinations were horrible. The Democratic National Convention was a farce with rioting cops and so on. Once I graduated from college in June, I pretty much stayed high nonstop for the next few years...it seemed like the best way to cope with things at the time. The good thing was that the events forged a strong movement and we opposition hippies were very unified. We still believed in the power of love and that we could change the world. And we had great music. Despite all that was going on, there was a sense of optimism and excitement.

These days I just stay pissed off all the time. Everybody I know agrees with me, but it's so frustrating to be so stalled out. I'm depressed that everything seems to be controlled by the religious right and the very wealthy. The stupidity and the greed are just mind-boggling.

And, of course, Vietnam was a very localized war, terrible as it was. Now there is no place safe. My husband and I have been trying to plan a vacation overseas somewhere, but everyplace we want to go is too dangerous. I personally would love to see Afghanistan which I think is very beautiful in a stark kind of way, and I love what I know of the people, but it seems totally out of the question to go there.

I hate it that Americans are so despised around the world. I don't think it was like that in 1968.

[RaleighNCDUer]

53. Liberal politicians were being assassinated, the cities were

burning, thousands were dying in a distant jungle and hard liners on both sides were hovering an inch above the button.

Yeah, it was scary. In many ways, scarier than today.

But you know how horror movies can be? 1968 was scary like the bad guy you thought was dead leaping out of the shadows. It was a high energy, amphetamine driven scare, with new shocks every day.

Today is like the other kind of scary. The long, slow, inescapable dread, the relentless inhuman monster that can't be stopped. You see it coming, and no matter how you run, it catches up with a walk. no matter how hard you hit it, it keeps shaking it off and keep on coming.

And all indications are that it will only get worse.

In that way, much scarier than '68.

[lonestarnot]

54. 68 tame in retrospect

[calimary]

55. I was discovering the joys of legal driving. High school. OUT OF IT.

I was quite sheltered and not very politically aware. I vaguely remember things going on, but didn't follow it much beyond the evening news over the dining room table. Most of the time my mom was too busy talking at, or over, the TV to be able to hear what Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley were saying. I was beginning to become uncomfortable about the war, though. And I was aware of the Gene McCarthy versus Hubert Humphrey tangle. I remember when LBJ pulled himself out of contention. I remember the assassinations that year - I liked Bobby Kennedy a LOT and he was killed here in L.A. so I remember feeling a lot of guilt about that. Hey, I'm Catholic. We do guilt for a living.

From what I remember - to now - it all seems to me that THIS is far worse. Mainly because we had an independent, adversarial press back then, that wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions and show the harsh realities. I mean, we watched the Vietnam war carnage over the dinner table every night! During that era, we saw all the My Lai wreckage. The student protests. The Kent State murders. The multiple anti-war rallies (that did get covered). When RFK and Dr. King were shot. And the music was all there. If you were discovering FM radio at that time (and it was coming to life back then - when we all realized you could listen to music on the radio in stereo), the airwaves were FULL of protest music and anti-war activism and disc jockeys who did free-form progressive shows and anti-establishment commentary. Our pledge of allegiance was played by Jimi Hendrix and his fiery rebel guitar, which blew everybody's mind.

The war and the civil upheaval and social revolution were common knowledge. All of it. It was all over the news. All over "LIFE" magazine (which was then still a mightily viable publication). All over everywhere. And even somebody as insulated as I was could tell something very restless and jarring was going on. I myself was led and enlightened mainly by the music and the radio. Politics was another matter for me. All I saw was what was on TV every evening. I think I even did watch the convention (they used to have gavel-to-gavel coverage back when it was considered a BIG deal) so you couldn't miss it. But most of the time I didn't have much awareness of what or whom I was watching, or an inkling about what anybody's speeches were about. Journalists covering the convention were getting arrested - I think it was John Chancellor of NBC who was dragged away in the middle of a live report - his lockout was "...somewhere in custody." We do NOT have an independent press now. We have a pussy press. A pandering press. A poodle press, as some DUer put it a few days ago. I think that's the difference. The assholes now are merely able to get away with more because the press has been silenced. And these bastards have been allowed to run amok - unchecked.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

60. An independent press. I'd forgotten there was such a thing...and even....

...then it was not really independent. Operation Mockingbird was enacted in 1948 by the CIA:

<http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html>

QUOTE:

Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.

Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.

[H2O Man]

78. Jimi Hendrix!

Oh, yes, and there were other musicians making powerful cultural statements. James Douglas Morrison was making a very powerful anti-war statement with "The Unknown Soldier." Many radio stations refused to play it. The Beatles released perhaps their greatest work on a sometimes strange double album entitled The Beatles, but popularly known as The White Album. It contained the anti-war song Bungalo Bill, the questionable Revolution 1 (which had a little different lyric than the faster Revolution on the flip side of the single Hey Jude), and the odd Revolution 9. But Jimi's beautiful versions of the SSB, which would get the greatest attention later at Woodstock, was an amazing and patriotic statement.

[Oeditpus Rex]

138. "The whole world is watching!"

From the teevee coverage of the protests outside the DNC (much of it live) we understood that it was Mayor Daley's police force and not the protesters who were the offenders.

These days, the images of the cops beating the kids wouldn't be aired.

Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'...

(Does anybody remember the name of the shirtless, finger-flipping guy whose photo ran full-page in Life? That was the portrait of the era.)

[Media_Lies_Daily]

56. I was 17 in 1968, and it was a bad time, but the current time is....

...much worse, IMHO.

In 1968 we were seeing the dead returning from Vietnam, LBJ was quitting, and the corrupt GOP political system led by Nixon was beginning to emerge. The Cold War was deeply entrenched in the economy, and the defense companies were making bucks hand over fist. But we still had people willing to stand up and lead the opposition, and the elections were still being held on a level playing field. We also had strong allies who were united with the US against the Soviet Union, China, and the Warsaw Pact

Today, we are ruled by the rightwing NeoCons allied with the Fundies in a lethal self-righteous cocktail. Our military is involved in two wars in the Middle East, and are operating in dozens of other places around the world. Our economy has been shifted to feed the military while taking far less taxes from the rich. There is an undercurrent of ouraged anger beginning to grow among the poor and downtrodden whose ranks are growing at an exponential rate. We have also forced the rest of the world to begin to take measures to isolate us, in much the same manner as the Axis countries were isolated during WWII. The world's investment flow has shifted away from the US, and toward China, Europe, and India.

I honestly don't know at this point what it's going to take to reverse what's happening today, but the longer it takes to start the process, the worse the outcome is going to be.

[saigon68]

57. Your mother is correct

I was in Nam going through TET

King was killed

Kennedy was killed.

The Mexican Government massacred hundreds (some say thousands) of students

Johnson said he wouldn't run for reelection

The Democratic convention turned into a Police riot.

Hundreds of people were killed in rioting in dozens of cities.

In the Olympics 2 black men were reviled and suspended for wearing black gloves on the Podium after winning gold medals

2005 can't hold a candle to 1968.

[bobbieinok]

117. had forgotten Mexico and the black athletes at the Olympics

didn't they give a black power sign instead of saluting at the national anthem??????


(in 72, Kent State, Jackson State MS, and the Israeli athletes murdered at the Olympics in Munich.....)

[no safe haven]

161. One of the highlights of 1968, IMHO

Tommie Smith and John Carlos @ Mexico Olympics 1968

Edited to include text

[pauliedangerously]

58. I WAS 2!!!

I just saw the headline and I thought I'd write something before reading the thread. As I scrolled down through the subject lines to get to the writing box, I saw most people were older than I am...at least the ones who mentioned their age were.

I was a tiny kid living on a hill in rural New York...yeah, they have farms in New York too. We used to get our milk from the dairy, and our eggs from the chicken farm, and we grew a lot of our own vegetables--and raised a few chickens and pheasants.

That was '68. In '74 we moved to Houston, TX. Imagine being a young Yankee kid moving to Texas in 1974. WOW. It was an experience that really opened my eyes to reality. It taught me that even though we all live in the same world, we all have different perceptions of it.

I am amazed at what other people think. This world has always made sense to me, and I've always felt pretty sure about when people were bullshitting me or not.

Comparing today to 1968, I guess I don't really have a good baseline; but I have gotten kind of numb to the human condition at this point--or at least I'm not agonizing over it. Looking at history, you can see that things change slowly, and right now, humanity is going through a phase. We are discovering each other.

The human population isn't going to die out and things will continue one way or another. The rich and powerful won't rule the world and people will adapt to things no matter what happens. There are people who live in tents in Siberia and under trees on the Equator; the day by day stuff can be depressing sometimes, but we humans will keep it rockin' along.

[Beam Me Up]

63. No comparison. This is MUCH worse. 'The Establishment' are out of control.

This is a very different and far more serious situation. It isn't the majority of the people who are dismantling our federal government from the inside out. That's being done by a relatively small group of very wealthy fascists--while WE mostly let them. They have control of all three branches of our government AND the media.

The one thing they do not yet have total control over, however, is the internet. They can not control the free flow of information so they do the next best thing: they control the consensus PERCEPTION of what is actually going on. That is, everyone goes on acting AS IF everything is 'normal'.

But this is NOT normal. There is absolutely NOTHING "normal" about this situation. The people who are in control of our government and our military and the vast stockpiles of nuclear, biological and other weapons of mass destruction ARE INSANE. They are TERRIFIED by the prospect that a REAL SOCIAL CHANGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS COULD TAKE PLACE. They are terrified, in other words, that they MAY LOOSE CONTROL of the levers of power now in their hands.

They don't yet realize, I guess, they'd all be happier and a lot better off if they DID. The burden of "authority" is much more easily bared when it is shared, I think. Evidently THEY don't see it that way.

This is like a mirror image of 1968--

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!

Edit to add: I was 20 in 1968; it was one of the most INTENSE years of my life. But it wasn't FEAR BASED intensity. Quite the contrary--there was a buzz, a feeling of excitement and wonder. Of course there was some fear, too; there was a real war going on and there was real and growing opposition to it and the powers that supported it.

But I don't think we knew then what we know now. At least, I didn't. I mean, I knew there was something fishy with the JFK assignation, and the Robert Kennedy and King assassinations only added to my suspicions. But I was young and I believed the future COULD BE better.

Now we understand that they can not be--not without significant change in the STRUCTURES OF POWER. This is fundamental. AT THE MOMENT WHAT WE HAVE IS A LAWLESS GOVERNMENT. Or, to put it more accurately, a government that makes its own 'laws' as it goes along.

Millions of people marched against the Iraq war here in the United States, even before it began! That didn't stop them. The whole thing barely got a mention and yet some of those demonstrations were far larger than ANYTHING I saw in the 60s and 70s.

[seventythree]

64. Not much to add

to the numerous eloquent memories already expressed. I was in college, but my gut about that year, looking back, was things were just getting started. Yes, there was RFK's assassination and the convention riots but the world didn't start getting really ugly and scary for me until Kent State and Jackson State. They weren't just killing us abroad then, they were killing us at home. That's when all hell broke loose with the days of rage and the closing down of every campus in the country (or darned near it). I have sort of the same sense now -- things aren't really ugly yet, but it's coming.

I feel more depressed about what is going on now, however, because I am no longer young and filled with the hope and idealism I had then -- that feeling, already mentioned, that we could change the world. In myriad ways we tried to do that, and not just at 22, but at 32, and 42, and 52 -- and look where we are? Like it was all for naught.

Up thread, someone posted that it has to get personal, like the draft was, like Kent State was, like Schiavo is -- the poster is correct.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

65. I was in Paris in 1968

attending the American College In Paris. It was at the time that the students protested in the streets and set up barricades. Afterwards, every union in France went on strike and the entire country was shut down. I thought it was a very exciting time. If the world came to a halt and completely re-evaluated itself, I didn't care. I guess when you're young (I was 17) you have a feeling of immortality. I went back to Berkeley in 1969 shortly after the incident of People's Park. It was the year of the Black Panthers, the Native Americans seizing Alcatraz Island, Kent State, and Jackson State. It was the year (or it might have been early 1970) when young 16 year old Charles Oatman was beaten to death by the police in a Georgia prison and a couple of hundred demonstrators marched in protest. Six African Americans were shot in the back by the police and killed as they ran from the confrontation. We almost never hear about Charles Oatman anymore or that incident in which 6 people were murdered. The young kid had cigarette burns on his body from where the police had tortured him for fun, on his hands, feet, and buttocks. This was a 16 year old kid who only weighed 104 lbs. The local authorities tried to keep the county coroner from examining the body, claiming that he'd died from a fall from his bed in jail. But the coroner's report stated the cause of death as “pulmonary edema, bilateral; and subdural hemorrhage, moderate, due to severe beatings.” He also noted that the corpse was covered with “contusions, abrasions, scratches,, and minor lacerations,” as well as “roughly circular lesions that were healing burns that could have been caused by a cigarette pressed against the skin."

Yes, when I look back on the period of the late 60's, it was a scary time, but I guess being young, I just didn't realize it then and nothing could keep me from protesting and marching back then. I don't think the present day quite encompasses the same feeling of tumult and upheaval, but we might be heading there.

[ConsAreLiars]

66. Please nominate for Greatest Page

I suspect a lot of us have become engrossed in the content and forgotten this option. The kind of historical perspective presented in these posts is important.

[kineneb]

67. another 10 year old

My memory is rather poor, from the bouts of depression between, but what I do remember are impressions, like still photos:

RFK being shot...Dr. King, too,...death and body bags on tv...riots...lots of anti-war music (I am a musician, so I noticed)...hope that black people would have equal rights...long hair, short skirts...

[ElectroPrincess]

163. Yes, make that three 10 year olds in 1968 ...

I remember my parent's crying and calling for word of my brother who was wounded by shrapnel in Vietnam. Also, we would put together a number of care packages for my brother and his buddies. It's silly but the treat that stands out most to me, almost visually was "Fiddle Faddle" (sort of like popcorn peanut brittle).



It's strange how when you're young the oddest things stand out in your memory. ;)

[Cleita]

68. I was twenty eight years old, and things were rather internationally

dicey. Our country was in a ridiculous war, which begs the question to me why we are doing another ridiculuous war, but I'm not as scared as I am now. We still had a democracy then. MHO

[missouri dem 2]

69. It was more polarized then. But it was mainly polarized between

the generations. Our generation believed that we would change the world and in some ways we already had. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement forced the civil rights acts and the end to segregation of the schools. They could and did kill our leaders but there was no way that they were going to stop our Movement. The college campuses were on fire with activism.
Today is very disenchanting. Here we are 37 years later and still fighting the same battles. Today it is very hard to believe that we will change the world. It seems that the best that we can hope for is a return to some level of sanity.
Where is the current generation? Too busy looking for a corporate job? Snowed by the "Liberal Media"? If they were in the streets I would have a much better feeling about the future.

[flygal]

70. I was born that year - my mom has told me how scary it was

and now I'm home with a new baby and thinking the same thing. I hope my kids get a nice life but it sure looks frightening right now.

[PlanetBev]

72. I started college in 1968...

You never knew what was going to happen next, that was for sure. Curve balls came in the form of assasinations, riots, protests, you name it. But one thing was obvious. America was in a definate state of progression at that time, despite the gale force winds that buffeted it. We had a press that asked hard questions it's leaders, people were engaged and aware, the civil rights movement was a full-blown battle, and the women's movement was about to be born. The period we are in now is marked by regression, fear, cowardice of the press and the Democrats, deranged Republicans, media propaganda, complacency of the citizenry and religious fanaticism. I would gladly re-live 1968 a million times over to escape 2005. This is a terrible, sick period in U.S. history.

[Fovea]

71. I was 13

and I went from supporting the war, because I had relatives in Nam, to opposing it entirely. Along the way, I learned a lot.
I saw a part of the Chicago riot.
I lost my trust in authority.

But I remember the wave after wave of horror. And I remember that the American dream turned nightmarish.
Everything broke at once, and the scales fell from the world's eyes.

From Chicago to Paris to Prague, the world burned.

The things falling down in 2005 are bigger, more dire.

[countryjake]

73. It wasn't "pending" back then, it'd already been moving for years.

It was a scary time, no doubt about it, if you were political. A sort of paranoia set in that year; we began distrusting our phones, learning locations & numbers of the best phone booths & holding organizing meetings out in the open & even then, "they" seemed to find out what we were up to.

You learned to check out someone's shoes, if they were overly eager to join the movement, cause the FBI was everywhere. Radicals were singled out, framed, imprisoned, shot dead; mysterious firefights flared up; thugs could appear out of nowhere & beat the crap out of anyone, then disappear. If you were in a union, you learned that year NEVER to make a mistake on the job, break the law, or park your vehicle in an unlit, obscure place.

It was the year of out-of-control counter-intelligence & "they" infiltrated, wire-tapped, & investigated anyone & everything, even those just on the fringes of "anti-establishment", & they followed no rules. Most of your friends began carrying rocks in their pockets...goon protection, we called it, & public events required "affinity groups". Spontaneous discussion of ideals broke out wherever & whenever, all the time, & if you were working class, you'd find common ground could be reached in most every conversation, if it was grounded with respect.

There were so many neighborhood & political rags to read, & they were just as informative as this internet; people were inspired & urged to action with the feeling that we could bring about change. It was scary but there was also incredible hope, that dream was yet to be smashed & the sellout hadn't happened. When people sang "Power to the People", we really felt like the day was right around the corner.

Now, I feel the chains we failed to break back then have simply tightened, as expected. Nature of the system, I guess, but I still have incredible faith & to steal a line from Jimmy Cliff, "The harder they come, the harder they fall".

[EST]

76. I was twenty and trying hard to avoid Viet Nam

Although 1968 was a year of personal tragedy for me, things are worse, now.
Even most republicans were cognizant of the dangers represented by unfettered political and military power. The dark powers of today are much more sophisticated. Those powers were there, then, but were still learning their diabolical trade. The danger of a "final solution" is much more palpably and intellectually present now than then.

[dave123williams]

77. I was a month old at the end of that year..I have dim memories of mamaries

[screembloodymurder]

80. 1968 was a great year compared to 2005

America is falling apart at the seams.

[mopaul]

81. when i was 17, it was a very weird year

and i never dreamed it would all end up like this. never

[Cooley Hurd]

82. 1968 was a very tragic year for my family personally...

I was 2 1/2 years old at the time, but a terrible event happened to us only two weeks after Bobby Kennedy's assassination. My father drowned in front of all of us at our camp on Cayuga Lake. We were boating, and my sister (5 years old at the time) fell out of the boat. Her life jacket wasn't secured tightly enough and she slipped out of it. My father jumped in and saved her (getting her back into the boat), but became entangled in the weeds. My older brothers dove in to try to untangle him, but it was too late. The FD found his body at the bottom of the lake 3 hours later.

I know this has little to do with what you were asking, but I've rarely, if ever spoken about it on DU (or anywhere else, for that matter), and this event is my only correlation to the year 1968...

[H2O Man]

110. That's a sad story.

I had a cousin drown, and I know how it impacted my extended family. Yet it was not the same as your family's tragic incident. I can understand why you would not talk about that often. Sometimes I think that this is the type of terrible experience that the president and his friends cannot relate to. They lack the ability to understand not just the terror of an accident, such as your family experienced, but how their policies cause devastation to families around the world. Thank you for sharing this with us.

[shance]

154. Im so sorry Cooley.

Losing a parent at such a young age is very difficult.

[Art_from_Ark]

165. I can empathize with you

I had to deal with death on a personal level four different times during that one year.

The year started with my aunt dying. Then in March, my dog somehow escaped from the backyard, ran into the street in front of my house, and was promptly run over.

Then in July, one month after the Bobby Kennedy assassination, I had been over at a neighborhood friend's house playing and had gone back home. A couple of hours later, we heard all sorts of sirens going down our street. As it turned out, one of the kids I had been playing with a couple of hours earlier had been hit by a truck and killed while riding his bicycle-- just a half block away from where my dog had been run over four months before.

And then there was August. I had a good friend in elementary school named Johnny. One day, Johnny wasn't at school. No one thought much of it, I guess, but he wasn't there the next day--or the next-- or the next. Days became weeks, weeks became months. Finally, our teacher told us that Johnny was in the hospital, but that he might be coming back. Then, a few days before summer vacation was to begin, Johnny came back-- in a wheelchair. We all cheered when he entered the room. But that would be his last day ever back at school.

Summer vacation came, and I was riding my "buzz" bike around a different neighborhood when I met Johnny quite by accident. He was sitting on his porch, crutches at his side. He invited me in, and showed me all the stuff he had gotten while he was in the hospital-- a little toy duck, a $10 bill, a little radio. Then Johnny dared me to ride up the big hill in front of his house on my bike. I did, and he was impressed. A few days later, I saw his obituary in the newspaper.

[CroixRoussienne]

85. 13 years old

I was born into a big (12) Catholic family and I remember having been living in shock for years, since the death of a sister in '59, my father in 62, Kennedy in '63, Malcom, Martin, and Bobby, and more conflicted about the Vietnam War the closer the draft got to me (my parents were both military, and raised me to honor the flag)... My oldest brother was 4F-ed due to asthma and the next two fled to Canada. I spent '68 to '73 feeling like I was staring down the barrel of a gun, especially as the nightly news carried battle coverage regularly, protests were rabid, and "The Berkeley Barb" had huge, front-page pictures every week of the mayhem of war - I remember most vividly the photo of a shattered skull lying on the street in Saigon, brains oozing out of it.

[Maestro]

86. April '68

The month and year I was born. Sorry don't remember anything but I hear it was a tumultuous year. ;)

[RebelOne]

87. I was around in 1968 and it was nothing like it is now.

The nation in 1968 was not on the verge of total meltdown as far as I remember.

[sellitman]

88. I was 12

Nothing compares witht the mess we have now. Not even close. IMHO

[ProfessorGAC]

89. Me Too

I don't know that the era doesn't compare with the mess we have now, though.

Back then, i'm sure i didn't realize how messed up things were, but in retrospect, it was pretty screwed up, socially.

Not saying we're not messed up now. Just that i think there's a far comparison to be made.
The Professor

[bigtree]

90. MLK was assasinated and D.C. was a mess

Lots of smoldering brick. But I was just 8 and that was a limited view on my part, but it stuck with me. Almost every day I would see someone carrying a TV (stolen?) down the street on their shoulder. The D.C. Transit, the bus line in my neighborhood was in chaos, always packed, with folks just boarding and debarking without paying through windows and the back door. Lots of broken glass everywhere. Might still be the same today, I don't venture back there anymore.

Oh yeah, and there was an unbelievably high death count from the war in the upper corner of the TV everyday that just kept climbing.

[DebJ]

91. I was 12 in '68, living just over the Washington DC line. That

explains my involvement with politics today. Living so close to DC, back then, anyway, national news WAS the local news. I watched DC burn from a hilltop just outside the city during race riots in that era (was that '68? maybe '69). My Dad worked in NE DC, and he had a brick thrown through the window of his pickup on the way home from work. My Dad, born in redneck New Orleans, was a racist, and we had many heated debates on race issues and riots over the dinner table. My Mom was born in DC, surrounded by all ethnicities (which in her childhood, meant not only black/white/Asian, but also Polish, German, Italian, Jewish...extremely segregated neighborhoods.). So my Mom was not bigoted in any fashion.
I watched injured Viet Nam vets daily on TV. I mean, DAILY. Sometimes it seemed the same news report repeated itself night after night.
I was not at all frightened by the civil unrest: instead, it seemed that Lady Liberty was raising her fist and chanting: Power to the People. Living so close to DC, and being young, I grew up believing that protests are simply normal, ordinary course of life in a free society, a good thing, and should ALWAYS be going on. I think that is quite a healthy outlook still. Just wish there was more of it today.
The abortion issue was raging then, too. Abortion became legal in DC in 1970, the first place it was legal...and I think that preceeded Roe v Wade.
1968 is the only year I kept a diary. I still have it. But most of it is blank or filled with the words of an adolescent struggling with blooming sexuality. But three entries in that diary always come to mind: MLK assasination; my Grandfather's death on St. Patrick's Day, and RFK assasination.

[Virginian]

126. DC riots were in April of '68.

They were spawned by the MLK assasination. I was on the other side of the river in Alexandria. School was just a meeting place, the teachers did not teach that day, we just had discussions. The mood was racially charged. My Mom called the school to have them send me home but I never got the message.
My Dad was out of town with the car and we were supposed to catch a Trailways to meet him in Richmond. We caught a cab to the bus station in Alexandria and waited and waited. The bus was coming from DC to pick us up, but it was late. I tried calling my boyfriend on the pay phone, but the lines were so jammed, I couldn't get a dial tone. I was persistant, and when I did get a dial tone, I also got the 4 or 5 dimes others had put in the pay phone before me.
When the bus did arrive, an hour late, the bus driver was telling us about driving through the riots in DC.
I don't remember anything else about that weekend.

[dbt]

92. When I was seventeen, it was a very strange year.

But 05 is even worse, impossible as it seems. In 1968, there was some viable opposition to a government which had become "destructive of these ends," as referred to in the Declaration of Independence.

In 2005, Murkins seem quite content to worship bu$hler, even though his approval ratings are lower than whale shit. As long as we have our Bread and Circuses, we'll put up with his sorry ass because it's just too much trouble to change things.

There's your trouble.

[Hekate]

93. I was almost 21, working for Eugene McCarthy in So Cal

We really thought we could change the world -- that was the best part. Many of us wanted to do good, many of us had the Peace Corps packet somewhere in our files even if we never applied. I grew up on Oahu, a world away from the Civil Rights movement, but the images that came to us there are indelible in my memory.

The worst parts were the riots and assassinations in the US while the war was spinning out of control in Vietnam. I saw what could happen when people despaired of having an affect by peaceful means -- it all poured into our living rooms on black and white TV.

My family moved from Kailua, Oahu to Cucamonga, California in 1965, just in time for the Watts riots in Los Angeles. During the 3 years I lived there I went to community college, and in that time the country endured riot after riot and assassination after assassination. It felt like it would go on that way forever.

In 1968 a friend who was a Poli Sci major at Long Beach State started telling us about Senator McCarthy, who was the first presidential candidate to come out against the war. Lyndon Johnson finally got the message (LBJ didn't hide out from the protestors the way W does) and decided not to run for re-election, which cheered us up quite a bit. A group of my friends and I ended up running the campaign hq out of a storefront in Ontario, and ultimately did quite well -- that is, we carried our end of the county for McCarthy in the primary election.

There was no joy for us, however. We watched the returns down at the headquarters until it became clear we were losing to Bobby Kennedy (whom we thought of as an opportunistic latecomer to the anti-war cause) then trailed off to our homes. I tried listening to more of the returns, but my transistor radio batteries gave out. I was living rent-free on the top floor of an old Victorian house, where I did morning housekeeping for the elderly owners. When I went downstairs the next morning they were glued to the television set; "Isn't it terrible?!" they said to me, and that's how I learned Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in his moment of triumph.

I think all of us felt as though it was a savage blow to the gut. We went about in shock for days.

In my mind I was already on my way home to Oahu to finish college at University of Hawaii -- a green and peaceful place, a different mindset and way of life; I felt like I was actually fleeing the Mainland and all its troubles. But there was more before I went in late August.

There was the Chicago Convention; there was Mayor Daley's police-led riot, with its brutal suppression of dissenters. My Polic Sci friend told us (he knew people who were there) about the police invasion of McCarthy's supporters' offices, about cops slamming Democratic volunteers up against the file cabinets, cops tossing the contents of the office. Search warrant? Probable cause? They didn't need no stinkin' warrants to show those hippies what they thought of them, on the streets or off. Again, the images flooding in through television, frozen on the newspaper pages. And of course the convention itself...

A friend drove me to Los Angeles Airport on a hot and smoggy day. As we trekked toward my departure gate, we saw a phalanx of young people arriving from Chicago. They were all wearing black armbands.

Ultimately, we did prevail, you know. There was constant pressure from engaged citizens (especially the young ones), there were the actions of some really courageous people who put "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor" on the line, and there were a few newspapers that took their duty as watchdogs seriously. I remember when the Pentagon Papers were not only leaked, they were published by the Chicago daily. I went out to my Honolulu newsstand and bought a copy just to say I had it. The Washington Post had a couple of young hotshot reporters and they an editor and an owner with real balls, and they followed their story until it led them to the President. Nixon had opened US relations with China; Nixon got us out of Vietnam; but Nixon was still a lying crook, and he finally had to go. And it was a delegation of Republican congressmen who told him so.

We prevailed. We all breathed a sigh of relief and said, "The system works. The Constitution is whole. We got rid of a sitting president without a revolution or a coup d'etat. We have proven once again that we are not some banana republic that can only change rulers at the point of a gun."

Thinking through the bad old days, I have to ask why this feels worse. Maybe I'm older and have lost resilience and optimism. Or maybe what the Bushes have done is such a naked power grab that it's breathtaking. I think that's it. Nixon was a cold and twisted sonuvabitch, but he wasn't out to destroy the US, not in the way this bunch is. He passed landmark environmental legislation. He signed off on other social measures now being excoriated by the Right. His foreign policy was often intelligently designed and farsighted.

George W. Bush came to power via a bloodless coup, with 5 members of the Supreme Court beholden in various ways to his family. On Day One in the Oval Office he began signing legislation assaulting everything I believe in, and he has not stopped or even wavered since then. He seems to have thousands of minions researching how to do this, writing bills and getting them through the Congress. He (and they) are very very busy, 24/7.

The Bush assault on the environment, foreign relations, women's health, social programs, free press, media in the public interest, children's welfare, education, the budget, soldiers' and veterans' benefits, you name it -- is relentless. They have the certitude of a mandate from God, which they think they have. They are beyond shame in their means, because the end justifies the means.

The far right Republicans currently "own" all three branches of government, and their use of propaganda in the service of that ownership is breathtaking in its Orwellian constructs. Their "Enemies List" is so sophisticated that it would put Tricky Dick's list to shame.

So yes, this is worse. Never in my wildest imagination did it occur to me that I would someday contemplate leaving my own country, but watching Bill Moyers' program on Patriot Act 2 made me seriously consider it. Two years ago during the run-up to the Iraq invasion I attended a lot of public meetings. Three elderly Europeans independently said the same thing to me: "This feels like Europe in the 1930s." I got goosebumps hearing them answer a question I didn't have the nerve to say aloud...

I'm staying where I am, which for the past 25 years has been the Central Coast. After all, this is our country and nobody's going to clean up this mess but you and me.

Hekate

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

94. I was 14 and doing a civics project for school

we all had to do projects that had to do with the government. i chose to keep a file on each person running for president--the date he or she decided to run, some of their speeches, the date if they dropped out, etc.

when bobby kennedy was assassinated, i was completely and utterly distraught. you see, this project had made me so aware and to have a growing respect for kennedy. it took the air out of me, i cried for days, and have been politically active the rest of my life.

yes, i felt this country was falling apart.

[Suziq]

95. I Was 16 . . . .

in 1968. There is a big difference between now and then.

The religious nutjobs were not as prevalent. This aspect really frightens me. :scared:

However, I am confident America will see the light. I think the Repukes and religious right wingnuts really overstepped this time.



:hippie:

[mogster]

98. Here's some pictures/stories from '68

I was three years at the time, so I didn't participate ;-)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1681462&mesg_id=1682698&page=

[HeeBGBz]

99. It was pretty uproarious.

I was only 14, but I was aware enough that I knew our heroes were being murdered. The people were fighting back though. The riots, the War protests, it was what shaped my current attitude today. I wanted to jump in and fight too.

The difference today. Bush and the Repukes are way more wacko, but the people are too committed to their "stuff" to break out of the status quo. With a few remarkable exceptions, I must add.

[90-percent]

103. 1968

I was 14 at the time and pretty oblivious. I do remember vividly "dont trust anyone over 30", the generation gap, the credibility gap, and a national mood that the country was coming apart at the seams. There was a feeling that there might be a revolution where the young take over the country and kill all the old people who were screwing it up. I also remember all the middle class white kids renouncing materialism and rejecting their parents values outright - advocating communes, dope, free love and all that. Rock music was the unifying force and was everything! to most young people.

Vietnam was tragic and Americans had lived with the body count and body bags for a couple of years by then. War Protests were commonplace, draft card burning....

-85%

[Art_from_Ark]

105. Wow, I could write a book about 1968

It is one of the most vivid years in my memory.

And, ironically, I have been thinking about 1968 for about three weeks straight! I was actually thinking of starting a thread myself about this topic.

It started when I heard a song I had not heard in decades-- "Little Arrows", by Leapy Lee. Then all the memories started flowing like a cascade.

1968 is the year I started becoming aware of the world beyond my (at the time) sleepy little town in Arkansas. My brother got a short wave radio, and we listened to all sorts of exotic stations, from WWL in New Orleans, KMOX in St. Louis, KOA in Denver, and even the BBC. I was taking in as much news as I could. On Sundays, I would go to my grandfather's house and we would watch Face the Nation, Meet the Press (with Lawrence Spivak), and Issues and Answers (whose theme song was from Carmen Burana).

One time on (I believe) Meet the Press they had an interview with Arkansas' hawk-turned-dove Senator, J.William Fulbright. I listened attentively, because he was from my state. He said the Vietnam War was a mistake. My grandfather disagreed. I was conflicted, because I had not really been keeping up the war until then (although two of my friends had brothers over there, so I knew something was going on).

I don't really remember the King assassination, but I vividly remember the morning Bobby Kennedy was shot. Summer vacation had just started, and I went over to my friend's house after I had breakfast. When I got there, everybody was crying, because of the non-stop news reports about yet another Kennedy assassination. I knew something was wrong.

I vaguely remember watching bits of the Chicago brutality on TV, but my mother did not want to see it, so I had to turn the channel. They showed it on the news (we watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report in those days (the theme song was from Beethoven's 9th Symphony).

I also remember the daily casualty reports on the news. The American casualties were always low, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese casualties were always high: "In fighting in Vietnam today, 3 Americans were killed, 20 were injured, and 300 Viet Cong were killed". "Yay!" I would shout, "We are winning!"

There's a lot more I could write about, and I will when I get some more time.

[AngryOldDem]

106. I was 8, but I remember it well

I think the biggest difference between then and now is that people then were much more politically aware and awake than they are now.

[CindyDale]

108. Democratic majorities in Congress

To me, it was very different, most probably because of the control of Congress.

Democratic party had a majority in the Senate from 1955 to 1981 and a majority in the House from 1955 to 1994. We had checks and balances between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches.

There was a sense of doom and anger among younger people, but no one felt that American institutions were under attack by the Right. If anything, the attack was from the Left. :-) The government itself wasn't aligned with the radicals. The radicals were rebelling against the government and ideals that they felt had become corrupted.

You did not feel that you were watching canned propaganda whenever you watched television. Maybe that was because of the Fairness Doctrine. I don't know.

Those are the important things I can think of right now, but it seems very different to me from 1968.

[tlcandie]

111. I was 12 and remember VIVDLY seeing the assassination of JFK

on an old Zenith black and white TV on a wire stand. I remember seeing all the pictures of Vietnam and the protests and all that happened in this time. All of this mixed with Bonanza, The Rifleman and such TV series that my parents watched. Of course, I was a Trekkie!

The difference? Invisible chains abound in the country today stifling, controlling, maniuplating all of society and you feel it...the throes of death while being slowly suffocated.

1968 it was the promise of life in the throes of chaos and death, but it was vibrant, moving, powerful and full of electric energy.

[Contrary1]

112. I don't think it is close...

the difference being that in 1968, we would have already taken to the streets.

[Armstead]

114. Several differences

I was in high school.

1)That was the first time the nation was going through an upheaval that challenged basic status quo values in such a radical way. It was political, spiritual and cultural, and the "alternatives" were new and bizarre.....Now much of that has become more familiar and "mainstream." What's happening now is trying to tear down the few bits of actual progress that were made then in civil rights, non-0materialistic values, freedom of thought.

2)It had been a decade of turmoil up to that point, that had built gradually but steadily. What's happebninbg now is a lot more compressed.

3)Back then, the debates were more open and clerar. The forces of reaction are much more sophisticated today. Therefore more ominous. Subtle uses of public relations, marketiong and media manipulation are used to brainwash people.

4)Vietnam. Young people had a direct stake in the war, because their asses were likely to be hauled off there. Today, too many young people have the comfort of knowing they don;t have to go. So they are much more free to be "Rah Rah" patriots, because their asses are not the ones on the line.

[bobthedrummer]

115. 1968 SDS supporter here!

This is worse, we are being governed by fascists now. Our right to assemble needs to be exercised ASAP imo.

[leftofthedial]

116. In 1968, both sides were fighting

One issue--Viet Nam--dominated. This clearly polarized the country into two camps.

today, there is no single glavanizing issue. For whatever reason, Iraq has not mobilized a radical peace movement in the way Viet Nam did.

Today's situation is even worse in a way, because the population is fragmented along many lines.

We certainly have nothing (at least on the progressive side) to compare to the violence in the streets and the widespread civil disobedience that were commonplace in 1968.

[ArkDem]

118. Today is not even close to 1968.

[noonwitch]

119. I was 4, but my mom wrote in my "baby book" that year

She wrote about how worried she was for the future. The assassinations of RFK and MLK really bothered her, as did the on-going Vietnam War and on-going cultural revolution.

[formernaderite]

120. I was in college...and actually felt energized...

by the buzz of social consciousness. I remember taking some junior high school students for a tour of my old campus in 1976...it was surreal. Four years after I had graduated, the campus seemed dead. No one was interested in social justice issues...this new crop of kids were basically subsisting on weekends of pot.

[Bouncy Ball]

122. My husband was around

but he was busy pooping in his diapers and drooling a lot.

LOL

[notadmblnd]

123. I was 9 my grandfather died

my grandmother freaked out. My world was truly in meltdown.

[Eloriel]

124. Way worse now by several orders of magnitude

* It wasn't "fascism everywhere you look" back then

* Republicans were for the most part decent human beings and the Republican base wasn't fundamentalist whackos intent on Theocracy. (Really -- think about it, Barry Goldwater was "extreme" back than, so extreme he self-destructed; today he looks like a raving MODERATE.)

* They didn't "own" and/or control everything back then, like the entire government; hell, we can't even get our musical artists' protest music played on the radio!

* The media actually reported the news, such as protests AND

* The news wasn't manufactured and manipulated as it is now

* Thru it all, there was a prevailing sense of hope and optimism. Part of that was because of how energized and activated the youth of the country was, but part of it had to do with all of the above differences as well, plus just the times themselves: We can do anything, we can change everything was the sense we had; I absolutely do not see anything like that today. Today, we are all worried that it's all going to get alot worse no matter what we do, (partly because every damn day it DOES get worse): THEY OWN/CONTROL EVERYTHING, and there is no prevailing COUNTERING FORCE to what's going on and in fact, insufficient knowledge on the part of the people as to what's really going on.

I'd give anything to go back (and stay there :D ).

There's something else. I've seen a LOT of criticism by Gen Xers and others of later generations of MY generation (the Boomers) for not fixing everything and permanently. Here's what those of you who are critical of us don't realize:

* We DID change the world in some truly awesome ways and

* What no one could have known back then (but we can now because of the knowledge-acquiring/building synergism of the internet) is that the forces we're fighting are SO much bigger, more powerful and in their own way more organized than we ever could have imagined. Back then, we were successful in getting certain concessions out of them, but we didn't defeat them. They only let us "win" our petty little social issues to buy themselves time to go get stronger while we busied ourselves enjoying the concessions we'd won.

IOW: we didn't, COULDN"T have understood the true nature of The Enemy. Even today, the true nature of the The Enemy is understood by too few people on the Left.

[Raksha]

156. I'm 59, which means I was 22 in 1968, and yes...

...you are so right!

>>* What no one could have known back then (but we can now because of the knowledge-acquiring/building synergism of the internet) is that the forces we're fighting are SO much bigger, more powerful and in their own way more organized than we ever could have imagined. Back then, we were successful in getting certain concessions out of them, but we didn't defeat them. They only let us "win" our petty little social issues to buy themselves time to go get stronger while we busied ourselves enjoying the concessions we'd won.

IOW: we didn't, COULDN"T have understood the true nature of The Enemy. Even today, the true nature of the The Enemy is understood by too few people on the Left.<<

We did misunderestimate The Enemy, big time. Even then (or a few years later) I seem to remember my husband telling me something to that effect. He was more right than he knew or wanted to be, and a part of me can't help feeling relieved that he died during the first Clinton administration. So he never lived to see what has become of the country he loved so much.

[tavalon]

125. Unfortunately

While I would like an objective answer to this as well as to the answer about whether this is worse than the Reagan years, no one can give that to us. History gets painted in colors that have nothing to do with the here and now.

There may well come a time when DUers look back at our nascient protest, rage against the machine as being a time of great hope in the midst of great fear. Who knows?

What I do know is that for every activist in the 60s, there were 20 "hippies" who were just doing it to get laid and because it was the "cool, happinin' thing" and didn't give a damn about the politics. The big difference is that they looked like the activists so the activists co-opted them into the movement, thereby making it look much larger than it actually was. Those apolitical, "do the in thing" people are still around, it's just nowadays the "in thing" is to consume, to keep up with the Joneses. That's a hell of a lot harder for us to co-opt.

Yeah, we're fucked right now and they were fucked back then. Who is/was more fucked? Does it really matter while we're bent over?

[bobthedrummer]

130. I've got a severe case of cognitive dissonance from reading your post.

Those are your perceptions, not mine. I'm 55 btw, how old are you?

[tavalon]

134. Gosh!

Golly gee mister, I'm only 12! :eyes:

[Eloriel]

137. How old were you then?

If you weren't alive, or old enough to be aware of the times, then IMO you really have no business dismissing the testimony of those of us who found those times hopeful despite a few horrific events:


There may well come a time when DUers look back at our nascient protest, rage against the machine as being a time of great hope in the midst of great fear.

The difference is that the hopefulness and optimism and energy of those times were PALPABLE. These days, the fear and dread and anxiety and relative ABSENCE of hopefulness are just as palpable. While these are subjective feelings and attitudes, there absolutely CAN be objective assessments whether they exist or not and to a lesser extent their relative scope.

[tavalon]

140. This is ageism

Yes, I was alive back then. I've also got a number of friends who were a few years older than me and we're involved with the activism and the hippie culture, which are not the same thing, as I mentioned.

Why is racism and sexism not okay, but dismissing me based on my supposed age (ageism) okay?

In a word, it's not.

[DemBones DemBones]

158. So you were just a kid. nt

[tavalon]

169. Now I see why so many in the lounge

scorn GD. You guys are wound way too tight. I expressed an opinion you didn't agree with. Had you wanted this to be an agree-fest rather than a discussion, you should have labeled it as such.

[ElectroPrincess]

164. Yes it does matter ...

Now go to your room this instant!

LOL I'm teasing you kid ... I'm happy that you show interest in politics ;) >

My daughter's only two years younger than you for Heaven's sake. <warm smile>

[tavalon]

167. I didn't tell you guys how old I am

The smart-ass comment about being 12 was just that. I was young but very much alive in 1968 and as I said before, I have friends who were activists and also hippies. One of my partners and his mother were living just below San Francisco at that time. His mom talks often about the difference between the activist hippies and the hippies who were just along for the ride and the "free love".

[TWiley]

132. There is not the public criticism in the media

that there was which lead up to the events of 1968. The bushtapo has too much control over the media.

[Jimbo S]

133. One issue not mentioned much this thread: the economy

I'm only 39, but I understand in the late 60's the economy was quite good. Reasonable inflation and unemployment rates. People were financially secure. When people are comfortable financially, they have the time and energy to take on issues such as war, gender equity, racial equity and so on.

Nowadays, we have two income families. Some people work a second part-time job just to get by. People are concerned if they will have enough saved to one day retire comfortably. Many people have inadequate health insurance. If a person is on the edge with regards to money and health, where does one get the energy or time to take on subjects as corporate media, questionable election practices, religeous zealots taking over the government, etc.?

2005 is worse because many people fear we are heading to a third-world type of economy. The Golden Age of America is past us.

[RPM]

146. Good point - forgot about that

yeah - we actually had an industrial base and manufacturing jobs then

[Art_from_Ark]

166. Well, for some of us the economy wasn't so great in 1968

My neighborhood was lower middle class, and everything east of it was "the other side of the tracks". It was a big deal to go to the 25-cent Saturday matinee, or spend 35 cents for a few hours of skating at the roller rink. Lots of families were living paycheck-to-paycheck, even back then. But a big difference between then and now is that there was a War on Poverty back then, as opposed to the War on the Poor today.

[BurtWorm]

135. Forgive the metaphor, but US 2005 is in a persistent vegetative state

compared to US 1968. Then, there was some sense that progress was possible. For all the chaos, it was still just a few years after passage of the Civil Rights and Voters Acts, and war on poverty had actually been declared. True, the US's foreign policy was as evil then as it is now. But unlike now, the US had allies in Europe and elsewhere and the government was forced to be responsive to the growing peace movement.

I would rather things be generally as they were then than as they are now in many, many respects: Democrats in power, a counterculture thriving outside the grips of corporate culture, liberals in firm control of the Supreme Court, human rights on the rise...

[lectrobyte]

136. 68 was far worse. I was a young teen, but between RFK and MLK,

the war, riots, nuclear war worries, and probably a few other things I can't remember now, it was like anything was possible. And I don't mean that last part in the good way. Today seems almost calm by comparison.

[davhill]

139. Then we just yelled Fascism; now we are experiencing it

I was in College. Things were scary, especially the thermonuclear war business, but there was also a lot of hope. After all it was the Age of Aquarius and peace would prevail. Now there is a lot less hope. Fascism has prevailed. It will take a great deal of suffering to bring back the golden age of the 20th century.

edit for typo

[Iterate]

141. Whew, I'm worn out from remembering

Last year of high school, getting ready for the big time. Confused and stupid. Mundane and edgy. Naive.

Hmmm, yeah, in big trouble for writing 'radical' thoughts for a lame four page newsletter. Should have started a blog.

Heroes, plenty, some mentioned here, some not: Parks, Marshall, Berrigans, Meredith, Evers, Hoffman, Fulbright, Hamer, on and on. Your favorites got shot.

Villains, plenty more, but I think they had a different quality. Maybe someone like Ashcroft would have fit in pretty well. Spiro Agnew would have done well now. I don't remember anyone like DeLay.
Groupthink hysteria is fairly new. Now has so much 1984 in it, everyday.

Inspiration from abroad, from Paris and Prague (but not Mainz). Plenty of hope, support; you could share a better idea, a culture. There was terror too, from the cop you couldn't trust or the one megaton aimed 3,000 ft. above your head. You thought about it. Duck and cover.

And conflict, tension. Horrendous arguments at the Thanksgiving table. Your uncle was Rush. Or imagine being in school with Dan Quayle, GWB, Gingrich, a NASCAR crowd, the staff of NPR, Pacifica, and Air America. John Lennon too. Throw in a crowd from your local precinct and one across town. Kerry, Dean, and Jackson are there somewhere. Now make everyone young, stupid, drunk and drugged. That's about right. Civil War redux. Still fighting it.

OK, well, so far I've only set the scene but haven't answered your question. Get yourself full of rage first,

Then have a 9/11 every couple of months,
and triple the war in Iraq, with 200-500 soldiers a week killed
and 1,000,000 Iraqi dead, some wars in other places, Saddam had a coup and no one noticed, protest every day. Burn a city, dump a president, Tet and Hue, and and and

No, this isn't close to '68 or '69 or even '70. But I don't remember feeling impending doom. That's new.

[DemocracyInaction]

142. I was 23 at the time. I'll tell the difference--the BIG difference

In 1968 the PEOPLE were revolting against a government and a society that was trying to shove both a bullshit war and old bullshit ideas down our throats as usual. We the People recognized what was going on in this nation with it's hidden hypocracy and hatred and discrimination. People were informed and the media reported what was going on with no sparing of either the blood and didn't dress up the news with propaganda. In 2005 we have a nation of fucking dead morons who can't even spell USA!! They don't know nor care what is going on. They are losing everything that was ever fought for to make their lives what they are today and they just scratch their butt and flip their channels. A small bunch of so-called Christians (sicko little facists)are running the show directed by the tv preacher con men who are making a fortune off of them. And the corporations are now THE GOVERNMENT...and no one cares. In 1968 we were fighting our way up. Now we are content to be reduced to third world peons 'cause objecting just means too much work........

[YvonneCa]

172. I had just graduated from high school in 1968...

...and you are TOTALLY right! The American people used to understand that we get the leaders we deserve. To have good leadership in this country requires a knowledgeable (and therefore educated), caring, involved electorate. Somewhere along the line, we lost that. My hope is that those of us who understand what is needed to turn this country around WILL ACT to do so. I'm not sure what action will be required, but I know it includes changing our media and education.


:hi:

[Hardrada]

143. 1968 SDS Central Committee here

We had a very active unit and did our best to "raise consciousness." I felt I was right in the center of things in 1968. It is still the same capitalist scum running Amerika then as now but the consciousness was raised and a Viet Nam style war running a decade is no longer possible.

[pdxmom]

145. I was 9 years old, and remember that time so clearly, because

as a child living on the fringes of Washington, DC, it was actually physically scary. We had to go into DC to the train station to pick up my dad during the April riots. I'll never, ever forget that.

I don't have the physical fear now that I had then, but the fear I feel now is equally disconcerting. I'm generally an optimistic person, but I don't see any way out of the spiral we're currently in, which is a horrible way to feel.

[Left Is Write]

148. Well, I was, but I was only two.

I should ask my folks their impressions.

[Virginian]

149. The music was better then.

We had songs to protest wars.
We had songs with melodies so you could sing along.

Woodstock.

And we had heavy metal, too.

[RebelOne]

159. I can agree with that.

The music was much better. The music today sucks.

[YvonneCa]

173. Waaaaaaay BETTER ! ! n/t

[shance]

152. Thank you so much for posting.

1968 was one of the most significant years in Democratic history.

The fact that our party endured the murders of two of our best leaders within two months of each other leaves me numb.

I have talked to friends of mine who were active during that time. Most walked away from the party and politics after being essentially shattered by both events. Can anyone blame them? I am only grateful that some thirty years later they have become active again.

I frankly am outraged and baffled at our party for allowing these events to fade. There should not be a day or week that goes by that Democrats arent somehow reminded of these leaders that gave their lives to make our nation a better place. We owe those incredible leaders and Paul Wellstone much more than we are giving. We should wear their names and legacy like a badge of honor. What could be more honorable than the lives and work they did?

I hope Democratic leaders, citizens and Americans will realize knowing our history is essential to our success, but more importantly our loyalty and our legacy. Nothing like that should EVER be allowed to happen to our Party, or to America again. It was an assault on Democracy and our nation.

[SoCalDemGrrl]

153. 2005 in most respects is much worse than 1968...

In 1968 we had Walter Cronkite every night and at least he was not muzzled. Look at what they have done to Dan Rather.. Bush & Co. simply got rid of him.. that never would have happened in 1968 because the media was still fairly open. Cronkite's nightly diatribe about Vietnam had a cumulative effect on the Nixon administration. Bush & Co. realized that Rather was a similar threat and neutralized him.
Also on this and other threads I keep hearing about the lack of protest songs, however there are plenty of anti-war songs now. I know I'm in the music business and we get submissions every day from talented artists who have a lot to say about this administration, but as long as a handful of companies control radio (Clear Channel & Infinity) the public will NEVER hear them.
The major difference between 1968 and 2005 in my opinion is the MEDIA and as Marshall McLuhan said "the media is the message". We're in deep doo-doo!

[DemBones DemBones]

157. I agree, and I was a young adult in 1968 so I wasn't clueless about the

world. That was the year I turned 21, registered as a Democrat, cast my first vote for Eugene McCarthy.

The news for most of the war years was bad but we ousted LBJ and got Nixon -- ugh, but then ousted Nixon, too, so it seemed like we were making progress. Now we're stuck in a quagmire as bad as Southeast Asia and the media ignore it, plus we've been stuck with * for five years. It's giving me serious deja vu blues.

Oh, yeah, the music was much better then. Or, to be more accurate, you could hear good songs that you liked on the radio -- and I mean AM radio 'cause FM hadn't come into its own yet. The Beatles were still together and had turned music on its head with "Sgt. Pepper." Yeah, the best of times, the worst of times.

[raysr]

155. Drafted

3-14-68, US Army.

[Piperay]

160. I was in high schooL

now seems much worse to me. Maybe just because I am older now and when I was younger I was more oblivious just concerned about my social life, clothes etc. :shrug:

[rhite5]

162. I was around, a single mom trying to balance work and motherhood

in a new state with no support network.

1968 was a horrible year, unbelievable, with the assassinations of MLK and then Bobby Kennedy just before the California Primary and in the end the outrageous Democratic convention which left me shattered.

We still had Walter Cronkite who could try to make sense of things and he became an anchor for me.

I was not politically active then. I did not trust Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey was not my first choice for a candidate. My first choice had been forced out in the primaries. My second choice was dead. (he would have won the California Primary). The only electoral work I did was help with GOTV on election day itself (but with limited enthusiasm).

It was difficult to know who the enemy was. I had accepted the fact that the two assassinations were more or less random acts by crazies. Yes, I know better now. It was harder to accept the idea that the Democratic convention was messed up by militant blacks.

But I have to say this, 2005 is much worse than 1968, No question about it.

Now I am over 70 years old and I have seen a lot and sorted out a lot.

[steve2470]

168. Even though I was only 10, I do remember

the turmoil that year. That was how bad it was.

[RobinA]

170. I Was 10 in 1968

To me, '68 was more of the same, just a little more intense. The president was killed when I was 5. Now two more were assassinated. It was kind of normal to me at that age. Vietnam was so much white noise. It had been going on forever (in my life) and I didn't have older brothers or cousins to make it personal. My father was drafted in '65, but he was a doctor and remained in the States. I think I was 30 before it dawned on me that he is technically a Vietnam era vet. He hated Johnson with a purple passion and never believed in the Tonkin Gulf incident from the minute it was reported in the radio. (A moment he remembers like it was yesterday.)

Riots of various forms - race, anti-war - had been going on for awhile too, so that didn't seem all that momentous. Again, normal. None of it seemed quite as scary as a few years previous when the whole nuclear thing was more in the forefront. At least Vietnam wasn't nuclear, was the way I looked at it. (Not to sound callous here, but I'm writing what I thought when I was 10.)

In retrospect, 1968 was worse for events, but there was some hope. People back then were at least protesting, there was dissent on the wind along with the tear gas. Singers sang songs about things being wrong, you had your Tom Haydens and his ilk, Daniel Ellsberg, Jack Anderson, reporters trying to get the word out, newspapers suing to print the truth... They may have been wrong sometimes in their tactics but that were out there being heard.

Today the events are far less momentous generally, but the mood in the country is more like a flatline. ---------------------. I'd say it's more Europe 1936 than Chicago 1968.

[sharonking21]

174. Voices from the grave . .

Well, not quite yet. But I certainly do remember the feeling of impending doom. I was living in San Antonio and was 25 years old. We had already experienced the shock of JFK's assassination in 1963. Then in, what, 1966(?) the Whitman shooting from the tower in Austin. Seemed to be incipient or full-blown riots breaking out everywhere, demonstrations that became violent, Vietnam, civil rights not won yet, a host of things that were preying on our minds. My husband was traveling, so after work (I was a bookkeeper at a drilling company) I went out to eat by myself and I remember feeling good for a change, sitting there--nice weather outside, a full tummy, ...and then someone came in and told the restaurant about Martin Luther King's assassination. I went running home to the television, practically praying that he was wrong, but on the way I turned on the radio in my old Pontiac and heard the same thing there. Next came Bobby Kennedy's assassination. I had been watching the returns on television while in bed and went to sleep with the TV on--I awoke at about 2 or 3 in the morning to find them replaying the tape of the scene in the hotel kitchen. I called in sick that day.

As to a comparison to 2005, well, I think our situation is much worse now, but you have to understand that a lifetime of shocks has blunted the emotional impact. Back then, I was innocent. I expected people to behave in a rational and compassionate manner and for the world to be an orderly kindly place. The shock came from finding out it wasn't true. No longer. Now the only emotion I feel is frustration and anger that we have come to a place where I feel our very system of government and democracy is at great risk and sometimes it seems it will slip away without much fanfare.

[KitchenWitch]

176. I was 4 and am very empathic

I picked up on the fear my mom had. My dad was in night school and classes were often cancelled due to race riots, MLK was killed, the war protests were in full swing. It was truly a scary time.

I think we are in as much crisis now in our country, but many of us are so insulated from it that it does not feel like we are in that much turmoil.

[90-percent]

177. 68 vs. now

There was so much political awareness and involvement back then. Young people wanted to save the country, make us all care about poverty and racism and the military industrial complex. An incoherent war based on lies was not to be tolerated.

Now the country is being handed over to corporate facists by the mass media dumbed down populus. I would say the future of America in 2005 is much much closer to death than 1968. Back then the prospect of Orwell's 1984 was horrific and you'd go to jail to fight it. Now you welcome it and ask for another glass of Halliburton brand kool-aid.

-85%

[POAS]

178. I was 22 and one year married

My marriage eventually went to hell and so has the country.

The difference is that I got out of the marriage but I'm an American for life and need to fix this union or die trying.

In 1968 I became very dispondent over the assasinations and the general drift of politics and war but eventually we saw a light at the end of the tunnel and even Nixon got his in the end.

But those dark forces didn't go away they just regrouped and adjusted their strategy. Now they are back with a vengeance and the fight is on again but the enemy is stronger and wilier now.

[KitchenWitch]

179. I hate to say it, but I am afraid you are right

We are products of uber marketing and irresponsible media.

[DesEtoiles]

180. So what do we do?

[Karenina]

181. Meditate, pray, contemplate

put on our critical thinking hats, scream bloody murder and put up non-violent resistance? :shrug:

[No Exit]

182. "BOBBY SHOT IN HEAD"

I'll never forget the size of the print on those headlines, as my mother and I rushed to make our connecting flight at O'Hare Airport. Newspaper machines all over the place, and every one of them had the screaming headlines.

[tinanator]

184. published before or after the actual shooting?

I wasnt even 4 when Bobby Kennedy was shot, but one of my most intense early memories is that of my mother crying inconsolably at Kennedy's killing and funeral coverage. Id say those headlines were meant to send a message.

[European Socialist]

185. much better then.

We have had 30 years of a shrinking economic pie, which has caused bad feelings across the whole country.