Posted on 10/30/2018 5:03:24 PM PDT by Kaslin
Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman.
Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators.
Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what Charles Dickens called "the worst of times" in America? Is today worse than 1968?
Certainly, the hatred and hostility, the bile and bitterness of our discourse, seem greater now than 50 years ago. But are the times really worse?
1968 began with one of the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew interned by North Korea.
A week later came the Tet Offensive, where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.
On March 14, anti-war Senator Gene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.
With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race, accusing the president who had enacted civil rights of "dividing the country" and removing himself from "the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation." Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is "calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit."
Today, RFK is remembered as a "uniter."
With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy and McCarthy attacking from the left -- and Nixon having cleared the Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire -- LBJ announced on March 31 he would not run again.
Four days later, Martin Luther King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was assassinated in Memphis. One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be rebuilt for a generation.
Before April's end, Columbia University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.
Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals "the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals." Which many have since become.
In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in Arlington beside JFK.
Nixon, who had swept every primary, was nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic Convention was set for late August.
Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as "Prague Spring."
With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a Communist state!
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates and this writer were staying.
Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a "police riot."
When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." Daley's reply from the floor was unprintable.
Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.
Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people "aren't just hecklers," but "highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. ... Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country."
After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his government would take as its theme the words on a girl's placard that he had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: "Bring us together."
Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.
According to Bryan Burrough, author of "Days of Rage, America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence," "During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day."
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.
1968 was the most turbulent year in our lifetime. 79’ was second. 68 was settled when the voters elected a law and order Nixon. 80’ ended with Ronald Reagan settling things. I think this mid-term year will be the same for what’s been going on since 2009 with Republican acquiesence.
Not yet.
That’s exactly right. And not only were the young people personally afraid of being drafted and sent to war, they were the “baby boom” - meaning there was a whole lot of them, demographically speaking. They had just earned or were about to earn their political voice by virtue of turning 18, and feared personally for what they may be forced to do.
It’s not the same. And today’s youth have been raised on phamraceuticals to deal with their angst. You gotta find some amusement at the notion that 25% of youth exhibit or claim symptoms of PTSD at the notion of Trump’s victory. Truly they earn the word ‘unhinged’ if they allow all this noise to infect their view of themselves; and it’s got very little to do with Trump and more to do with the agitation and fear mongering in the chattering classes - the people who spread phobia with comments like “Trump is going to unleash nuclear war” etc. The chattering classes know better and are shameful in their nonstop assault on anything Trump and constantly blaming Trump, but the kids don’t have any perspective on elections or politics or world affairs.
The media and the Dems have gone way overboard in a naked attempt to grab power they haven’t earned and abused when they had it. They had it all in 2008 and frittered it away by deliberately and intentionally flaunting the will of the voters in starting in 2010. The voters came out to stop Obamacare by taking Congress away from the Dems and they pushed it through in a lame duck session anyway. It is one thing to have power and use the media to provide cover, it’s another thing and much harder to do to try to leverage the media and the media alone into power. But right now that’s all they have. They deserve to lose big next Tuesday. Maybe if they do they will change their tactics, but I doubt it. They don’t have anything else, no ideas, and lots of old people and foolish people vying for leadership. In part that’s because they fumbled and lost 2/3 of every state governorship, statehouse and are looking at a 56-58 seat deficit in the Senate next week. They don’t have a good bench of politicians to draw on. The field is wide open for a “Trump like” billionaire to step in and run over the Democratic primary in 2020.
ME? I was in THE BELLY OF THE BEAST ( Manhattan ) and not only saw far too much, up close and personal, but also lived quite close to the brownstone that the damned WEATHERMEN managed to blow up.
By accident, I came upon the likes of Abbey Hoffman and others, training the moronic followers and stupid kids, how to behave and what to do, some weeks prior to the Dem Convention in Chicago.
Just going for a walk, that summer, on a sunny weekend afternoon, could and often DID, turn into a vile confrontation, which was NOT anything I started or went looking for.
And no, things did NOT "quiet down" any, in the next ensuing years.
Radical leftism is far far more widespread especialy amongst under GenX aged
And far less well educated, even though they have sat in schools for a long time.
I wasn’t alive in ‘68 but my parents were married that year and my older brother and I were born before the next Presidential election. It was a horrible year from what my parents have told me. A year of terrible assassinations but also liberal media and college mob protests. My father was mobilized and on riot duty. Neighborhoods burnt and the signer of the Civil Rights Act and of the Great Society retired in disgrace.
Once everything settled down there was a 49 State GOP landslide in ‘72, a narrow GOP lost in ‘76 (winning 27 States), and landslide GOP wins in ‘80, ‘84 and ‘88 (winning 44, 49, and 40 States). It was a great time to grow up at least for me.
The last time around when the media and college left called for Revolution, sanity and a quiet family life at home won out. It wasn’t until Bill Clinton ran on Middle Class Values that the left won again by pretending to be something they are not.
In ‘68 the left exposed themselves for being against what most people really want. I hope and pray that is the case this time as well.
We’ll see November 7th
I was in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Pendleton in 1968. The riots got so bad that all passes from the base to go to Los Angeles or San Diego Were cancelled.
You obviously KNOW exactly how “bad” things were back then!
Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people "aren't just hecklers," but "highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. ... Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country."
...and now, they own the democrat party.
The FALN tried to assassinate Harry Truman in 1950 at Blair House, shot up the House of Representatives in 1954, and, in 1975, blew up Fraunces Tavern in New York where Washington had bid his officers farewell....
I say we’ll be getting there in 2019-2020 when Trump is running and gets re-elected.
Gonna be loads of fun.
Good thing young people these days are out of shape and less educated. Back in ‘68, no dude was swinging a bike lock like a girl.
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