It Feels Like

Sometimes 2017 feels like 1968. Boomers might remember 1968 as a year filled with anti-war demonstrations, ‘race riots’ and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

The Vietnam War was escalating and the somewhat controversial Richard Nixon won the presidential election in November.   He only beat his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey by 500,000 of the 70-million votes cast, but his Electoral College win was a landslide. Racist 3rd-party candidate George Wallace received almost 10-million votes and won five states in Electoral College votes including, sadly, my home state of Louisiana.

Nixon actually did a few positive things not always associated with Republican leaders. He ended a war (Vietnam) and created the Environmental Protection Agency. He also established some positive relations with China. But like the current Trump administration, the Nixon camp was full of corruption. Spiro Agnew, his first Vice President, was forced to resign early in his second term because of a tax evasion conviction and accusations of bribery. Less than a year later, Nixon himself resigned in the middle of swirling accusations related to his campaign’s break in of their opponent’s campaign headquarters during the 1973 campaign.

Back to 1968. Civil discord, racial conflict, loud and violent demonstrations protesting war, violent riots in reaction to the killing of a civil rights leader, protests and fights at the Democratic convention ... all resulting in a feeling among many of us that our country was falling apart. Sprinkle in the hypocrisy of a law-and-order president whose administration was full of corruption, real and imagined.

Any of that sound like today?

Is some of the fear from fifty years ago that our country is falling apart real? Or just my paranoia from my youth?  Something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Social media and hundreds of ‘news’ outlets add to the intensity. In 1968 we had only three national TV networks and a handful of local newspapers.

It has taken me decades of redirecting my own negativity into a general attitude of positivity and optimism. I hate that current events are conspiring to drag me back to a life attitude I worked so hard to change.