Voices in My Head
2020 Is Just Like 1968. It is All About Power.
2020 has been one hell of a year and we’re not even halfway through it. As someone who lived through 1968, I could not help but see the easy comparisons with that momentous year. Two years ago, I wrote an essay about growing in 1968 New York City
Fifty years ago, in 1968, a roaring fire swept across this nation and the world. As ThinkProgress.com writer Sam Fulwood III described in a piece recently, “This year marks the 50th anniversary of 1968, arguably one of the most traumatic years in our nation’s history, filled with war, riots, assassinations, political upheavals, and social unrest.”
No, we did not have a worldwide pandemic or the internet or a thousand media channels or Donald Trump as President. As I wrote on the 50th Anniversary of 1968, I was nineteen years old, and “I could not see how deep the water was rising around me and how I would almost drown in it.” The world order was being challenged and “upheaval was in no short supply.” The year shattered every innocence we may have had left as young people.
The Power struggles were everywhere. Our brothers were being drafted and sent to fight in a war that very few of us understood. The Civil Rights battles we thought had been won was far from over. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. There were demands for change on the streets of America often backed up by protests and uprisings. There was chaos in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention that summer. In New York City, the struggle for community control of our public schools continued resulting in a citywide teacher’s strike protesting that effort. It seemed like America was on fire.
Then, in November 1968 Richard Nixon who ran on a Law and Order platform was elected President of the United States of America. The issue then was about power. Who was going to have it and how were they going to wield it? America had been undergoing both a political and cultural transformation and Americans on the other side of that change freaked out. Nixon would call on the “silent majority” to support his policies in Vietnam. But, that code word was a call to action for a specific segment of the population (think Trumpsters) to rise and challenge the shift in this country. One group of Americans was taking power from the Old Guard and transferring it to a new progressive generation. That was not going to happen without a fight.
President Donald Trump recently tweeted a distorted version of a famous quote. The accurate one is by George Santayana (1863—1952), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. Scribner’s, 1905: 284). 1968 should have been the continuation of a long process to learn lessons from the past and remake America. Instead, we find ourselves here again. Somewhere, we took our eyes off the prize and veered off into reality show land. With the potential of four more years of Donald Trump, a starkly divided country, a Conservative-controlled judiciary system, and money and power in the hands of a few, we are again at a pivotal moment in our American history.
Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, recently wrote a timely opinion piece in The New York Times. In “America, This is Your Chance,” Alexander trumpets a warning, “Our democracy hangs in the balance. This is not an overstatement.” I agree. America finds itself in 2020 at a precipice overlooking a dark bottomless pit of disunity and the threat of civil war. As Alexander explains, “Too many citizens prefer to cling to brutal and unjust systems than to give up political power…” Those Americans will not surrender their “perceived benefits of white supremacy and an exploitative economic system.” Not without a fight.
The warning is punctuated by the plea that if we don’t learn the lessons of history and choose a wise path forward, “we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy.”
2020 is Now
So, here we are in 2020 and we’re still fighting many of those same battles as we did in 1968 and they all still revolve around who has the power and how will they wield it. In 2020, as we survey the American political scene, we realize there is much work that is still pending. Americans are asking again, “Now What?” The proposals for solutions range from “Defund Police” to promising to vote Blue in November. Neither of these recommendations will be enough. We have been here before.
This is another unprecedented opportunity to ask basic questions about what kind of America we want. Is the current economic model of capitalism sustainable and a guarantee of economic equality for all Americans? Are we ever to come to terms with a vision of America that truly reflects its ideals and not its ugly history? An America that is open to everyone who lives here, who contributes with their blood, sweat, and tears, and receives their just rewards for it. The genius will be in what lessons have we learned from our entire history as a nation and how will we apply them today so we don’t ever have to do this again.
