I was in Miami for the Republican convention and later in Chicago for the Democrat convention, and a year later, I was at Woodstock, all stories for another day.
1968 was war, race riots, assassinations. I lived through 1968 and I never want to go back there again which is why I turn away from Boomer nostalgia that attempts to glorify times that were profoundly anxious and disheartening.
1968 was indeed the jackhammer that rent our civic culture as Daniel Henninger writes in 1968: The Long Goodbye
Whatever civic culture the U.S. had until the 1960s, it was now transformed. After '68, we had a new kind of political and social culture, pounding like a jackhammer into the older bedrock. The country cracked. Look at those 1968 popular vote numbers; half the country went left and half went right.
Goodbye and good riddance I say, so I agree with Senator Obama who said
Senator Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."
I'm so sick of the sixties that when I picked up the latest copy of Newsweek
I yawned.
Posted by Jill Fallon at November 16, 2007 9:39 AM | PermalinkI was 10 years old in 1968... I hated it then and, like you, I don't want to look back to those times, I don't want to relive those times, there wasn't much good about those times at all (except for the moon landing the next year).