The American Roller Coaster Since 1968
In 1968 I was a teenager trying to survive high school. Much of what I remember that happened to me that year had to do with exams, jobs and girls.
Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and the presidential campaign were just background noise on television. The only news event that was on my mind was Vietnam and if it would end before I was drafted.
Most of what I subsequently learned about that era was either from books or documentaries. Some of my classmates were much more caught up with what was going on in the world. I just wanted to graduate and go on to the college of my choice.
1968 was the year everything in the American pot seemed to boil over. Established norms disappeared into that cauldron. The country was never the same again.
The early 1970’s brought us Watergate, a presidential resignation and finally an end to the Vietnam War. I married, began a career and bought a house. Again, I was more concerned with everyday life as opposed to the greater American drama.
But that drama was unfolding. Drugs had gone from a fun thing for some to the scourge that it is still today. With drugs came the urban chaos that made cities frightening to many as they hunkered down in their protected suburban enclaves…or so Americans thought for a while.
Living in New York meant fear of the night. My father-in-law was mugged twice, in the vestibule of his apartment building and once in Grand Central Station.
One morning at 5:15 when waiting for the bus, there was a loud bang which I thought was a passing car. When I opened my briefcase at work, there was a bullet hole and a slug I found buried in a thick ledger. I went to the police station to report it, the desk sergeant nonchalantly told me to go the station where the incident occurred. This was the New York of the 1970s.
Carter became president in the election of 1976 and another oil embargo resulted in lines for gasoline. Americans were used to this since we had an even worse one earlier in the decade. I began to have a family.
Our American malaise, as the president stated, ended with his prescription to raise our thermostats in summer and lower them in winter. We all were to put on sweaters in the winter and short-sleeved shirts in the summer.
Then came the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. President Carter was a good man but a bad president, without the ability to bring the nation out of the funk it found itself in. Nothing was going right. The economy was heading south, inflation was unprecedented, and our armed forces seemed incapable of rescuing those hostages.
Ronald Reagan was elected, and many Americans thought this “movie cowboy” would get us in a nuclear war. After a rocky start the nation seemed to become its old self — the nation that licked the Axis only a few decades before.
Slowly at first but, by the end of the 1980s, the “Shining City on the Hill” had somehow tamed inflation and had a working economy that was more in the black than red. We were on the way to defeating the Soviet Union, not with bullets but through our capitalistic way of life. Congress even functioned in a bi-partisan fashion.
Unfortunately, my generation, the Baby Boomers, then took over. Everything began to be seen through the prism of political party. Good ideas were subsumed if the other side came up with them. The Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama presidencies were not so much administrations as battlegrounds.
The loyal opposition of earlier times degenerated into a guerrilla force. Both sides ready to destroy the other in the name of party solidarity and ideology. But what once was the party credo has become irrelevant. Today the Republicans are not close to being conservative or libertarian. It is a leadership of old white men. While the Democrats don’t seem to have any governing philosophy and is a gerontocracy encompassing both sexes and all colors.
So, we are now in the grip of an amoral marketing genius turned reality TV star who beat a tired morally bankrupt political hack. If our Congress was to stay on perpetual recess would anyone care? The only functioning branch of government seems to be the judiciary. And how long will that be true of that branch with this craven misanthrope as president and a legislative branch that refuses to exercise its constitutional powers.
2018 is not 1968. In some respects, it is better. In some, it is much worse. The world of 1968 still had at its core the United States upholding a global system that it had instituted. America believed in that system.
We no longer believe that. We want to have all the perks of being the indispensable nation, but we have decided that duties and responsibilities of being that bulwark are too hard to perform. Other nations would complain about us being overbearing and domineering while demanding that the U.S. be just that to preserve the system.
The administration and Congress now tell us we can still have our cake and eat it too. They lie. They seduce us with promises that can’t possibly happen without our national will to do the hard work needed. I wonder whether this roller coaster America has been riding for the past 50 years will continue or will it just completely come of the tracks?
