Saturday, in Pittsburgh, the celebration of the Sabbath in the synagogue of Tree of Life became the place of the greatest mass murder of Jews in the history of the USA. Eleven worshipers were killed by a racist revolver man.
On Friday, we learned the identity of a crazy criminal who sent bombs sent to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this season of the campaign we saw ugly meetings between leftist radicals and republican senators.
Are we more divided than ever? Is our policy more poisoned? Do we live in how Charles Dickens called “the worst time” in America? Is it worse today than in 1968?
Certainly hatred and hostility, yellow and bitterness of our discourse, now seem to be greater than 50 years ago. But are times really worse?
1968 began with one of the greatest humiliation in the history of the American Navy. Pueblo of the American spy ship was kidnapped in international waters, and his crew interned by North Korea.
A week later, there was a TET offensive, in which every capital of the province in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand American soldiers died in February, 10,000 more until 1968.
On March 14, the anti -war senator Gene McCarthy won 42 percent of votes in New Hampshire against President Johnson.
With Lbj wounded Robert Kennedy jumped into the race, accusing the president who adopted civil rights of “dividing the country” and removing from “permanent and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, “calls on darker impulses of the American spirit.”
Today, RFK is remembered as a “unit”.
Governor George Wallace detached Johnson from the right, and Kennedy and McCarthy attacked on the left – and Nixon cleared the republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire – LBJ announced on March 31 that he would not escape again.
Four days later, Martin Luther King, who had a worker strike, was murdered in Memphis. A hundred American cities were exploded, setting on fire and riots. The National Guard was established everywhere, and the federal troops rushed to protect Washington, whose long corridors were gutted, not rebuild by the generation.
Before April, Columbia University exploded in the worst uprising of decade students. This was rejected only after the nypd in the campus was released.
Nixon called the takeover of Colombia by black and white radicals “the first serious skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to take up universities of this country and transforming them into a sanctuaries of radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social purposes.” Which has happened now.
In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the key basic California, was fatally wounded in the kitchen in the hotel where he announced victory. He was buried in Arlington next to JFK.
Nixon, who sweeping every basic one, was nominated for the first voting in Miami Beach, and the democratic convention was established at the end of August.
Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his armies of the Warsaw Pact and hundreds of tanks to Czechoslovakia to crush a peaceful uprising known as “Prydzka”.
Thanks to this most bloody military repression since the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: there will be no return in Europe. Once a communist state, always a communist state!
At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, thousands of radicals who came to raise hell that gathered the night in Grant Park, opposite Hilton, where the candidates and this writer remained.
The baits during the day and night chicago cops defending the hotel at the end of the week were fed up. One evening, the platoons of the fresh police arrived and accused themselves of the park and arrest of radicals when television cameras were going on. This would be called “police riots”.
When Senator Abe Ribicofff took the podium tonight, he directed the glow of the mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s response from the floor was unscinted.
Until September, the democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without damned and shouted.
Describing radicals disturbing each event, said Humphrey, these people “are not only hecklers”, but “highly disciplined, well -organized agitators. destruction of the country. “
After his little victory, Nixon stated that his government would take as a subject of words on the plaque of the girl he saw in the city of Deshler in Ohio: “In total us”.
Nixon tried in the first months, but it wasn’t.
According to Bryan Burrough, the author of “Days of Rage, a radical underground America, the FBI and a forgotten age of revolutionary violence”, “In the eighteen months in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported over 2,500 bombardations on American soil, almost 5 per day. “
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.
