Is it worse now, or can I remember worse times?

"Does it seem to be as bad as you remember it in the 1970's?"

This question, from a concerned daughter, got me to remembering bits of the '60's and '70's. 

• I was nine years old when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. I also remember standing in a long line with my parents, in the cold, waiting to drop a letter of support for the Civil Rights Act in the winter of 1963-64 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The summer of 1964 we moved, from Pittsburgh to a wealthy yachting beach town in southern California (Corona del Mar).

• In August of 1965, we drove to the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Station to welcome an AFS exchange student from Thailand into our home. I remember seeing the orange flames of Watts riots burning in the distance.
  
• The summer of 1967, the TV news was full of videos of fires in black neighborhoods. That summer, across America, racial unrest erupted into violence 158 times, resulting in 83 deaths.
• In the fall of 1967, I discovered that my junior high school library had removed the book, Tarzan, "because he had a child with Jane out of wedlock".

In retrospect, 1968 was the most violent year. I didn't realize it at the time, maybe because body counts (U.S. vs. Viet Cong) were tallied daily on the TV news. My memory includes several significant moments during 1968:

• January 31: The Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese, and a major challenge to President Johnson's claims of winning in Vietnam.
• February 1: Publication of the "Vietnamese Execution Photo", raising doubts of why the United States was fighting in Vietnam. Note: This is one of three images I remember to this day. The other two are a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in 1963 (I saw this years after it occurred) and children running, their faces contorted in screams, after being burned by a napalm bomb in 1972.
  
• February 17: Along with a busload of other junior high students, I was among those taken to hear President Johnson speak at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. We waved the "peace" sign to the press as we passed. We all got a good laugh when the video played on the local news, with the reporter saying, "It's unclear why the students were giving the 'victory' sign."
• March 22: Czechoslovakia "Prague Spring" began. I wrote a paper on Alexander Dubček, and the Prague Spring, soon after. Dubček was the newly-elected leader of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party, who attempted to reform communist repression. The reform movement ended in August with the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops.
• March 31: President Johnson withdrew from running for a second term.
• April 4: Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. There were riots in more than 100 cities. Richmond, California, established the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts as an alternative response (learned many years later when I became a supporter of the Center).
• April 11: Civil Rights Act signed into law by President Johnson.
• June 4: Robert Kennedy won the California primary, and just after midnight, was shot. He died on June 6th.
• July 1: Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of nuclear was ever-present, and still is to this day.
  
• August 20: The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the "Prague Spring" and deposed my hero, Dubček.
  
• August 28: Chicago hosted the Democratic Convention, with clashes between young demonstrators and Mayor Daley's police.
• October 16: During the Olympics in Mexico City, medalists "Jet" Smith and John Carlos lowered their heads and raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the American anthem, in protest of racism in the U.S.
• October 31: President Johnson announced that the U.S. military will cease all bombing in North Vietnam.
• During just 1968, 14,314 U.S. soldiers were killed and over 200,000 were wounded in Vietnam.

In 1969, my high school newspaper had its front page blacked out, censored by the "administration".

 

In 1970, during "free dress day", I went to the locker room to get ready for tennis practice. The head of the athletic department saw my colorful pants -- broad bands of red, yellow, and white with a rope belt -- and called me into his office. There, in front of a meeting of all the coaches, he said, "Look at how he dresses like a pansy!"

• I remember watching the "hippies" celebrating a cloudburst rainstorm, rare in southern California, by dancing in the rain as the rest of us ran for cover. I really wanted to be out there dancing!
• April 22, 1970: I participated in the first Earth Day out of concern for the human treatment of Earth.

In June of 1970, I moved with my family to Palo Alto, in northern California. A couple weeks later, we were off to Norway. I spent the summer in Norway, then moved to live with the a family in Belgium (where my sister had been an Americans Abroad exchange student). I went to a French-speaking public school, the only American in the school, and was bombarded with questions about the U.S. I was asked about racism, police brutality, Vietnam, and pollution. I vowed to investigate the role the U.S. played in these topics. And I did.

From the summer of 1971 to the summer of 1973, I joined numerous "movements" and protested for:

• freedom of speech
  
• freedom of self-expression (clothing)
• freedom of religion (freedom from religion)
• freedom of sexual pleasure
• freedom of sexual partner (though LGBT was still another 20 years away, and LGBTQA+ another 40)
  
• freedom from pregnancy (the pill was widely used by the mid 1960's)
  
• freedom from discrimination
  
• freedom to vote (I turned 18 and voted for McGovern in 1972)
  
• freedom from war (Vietnam)
  
• freedom to choose non-violence and not the military
  
• rights of prisoners
• rights of farm workers
• rights of students
• rights of the Earth and its ecology
• May, 1972: George Wallace shot.
• March, 1973: My draft lottery number was 181 (and, with the war ending, I was not going to be drafted).

All told, it was a crazy time in American history. There was more violence, more guns, more protests. Overall, I think it was a worse time than now. But there are a couple caveats...

Today, people seem less engaged with politics, more engaged with the economy (buying "stuff" seems more important). Even though there was more violence and more guns back then, I feel there is more fear now. Is that just an old man talking? Was my perspective as a youth reckless and naive? Certainly, death was an ever-present alternative with the war in Vietnam, so maybe taking risks and protesting wasn't such a bad choice back then?

I do believe the world is going to be taking some steps "backward" as far as human rights and caring for our planet. Short-term, self-serving choices seem to outweigh the long-term, global, community-oriented options. Perhaps the world is too complicated to be understood by me as an individual, and I don't trust the institutions that I have to cope with the complexity?

Luckily (unfortunately?) , this isn't the first and won't be the last time civilization bounces up and down. Even so, I choose to be hopeful, for in hope, I am being most human, imagining the world better than it is today.