1968 was a hard year in America. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy rocked us, and the riots and fires that followed on the streets of cities, including Washington D.C., made it seem like an all-out revolution or civil war might come.
Civil Rights and assassinations were not even the main topics of the day. The ongoing and excruciating news from the war in Vietnam hit hundreds of thousands of American families in their guts; the Tet Offensive, the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon all worked to tear the country apart. We were a deeply divided nation.
Divided—but most of us knew which side we were on. We were for the War or against it, for integration or against it, for police crackdowns or against them, for Nixon or against him, for youth and new music or against them. We had our toeholds, and, although circumstances sometimes reversed the position of an individual or a family here and there, we were deeply divided and entrenched,
The thing we all shared was the belief that we were right in our convictions and positions We had evidence to back them up: Vietnam would fall to the communists, and then Laos and Cambodia and a string of dominoes, or Vietnam was a quagmire we had inherited from France; The National Guard rightfully came to enforce integration in Southern schools, or white private academies would rectify the horrors of integration; young music and drugs were ruining the country, or youth and new music would overcome the ills of a failed generation of leaders; Democrats were divided, and allowed Hubert Humphrey, who had once been a “progressive” but now carried the legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam decisions on his back, to be their presidential nominee; Republicans eschewed moderates and embraced a once disgraced Richard Nixon. Etc.
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Now we have chaos. Will there be enough fire fighters to manage an already hot season; will a reduced FEMA and/or states be able to cope with floods and hurricanes that are at least in part the result of climate change; will a tilt back to fossil fuels exacerbate warming temperatures of air and seawaters?
The State Department is in shatters with huge losses of personal and discrediting of policies, and AIDS and other diseases once coming under control threaten to break free again with loss of US provided drugs. And world hunger threatens to increase. US farmers who have been addressing international food needs will need new markets. Cultural and political divisions and attendant real-world problems create fears on all sides.
The more concrete fears are with farm, health, and hospitality workers who are undocumented, or who have family members who are undocumented, or are brown-skinned and might be apprehended no matter their legal status. And it is not just Latin Americans. This week an Iranian chiropractor was picked up by ICE as he dropped a child off at Montessori School in Portland. Undocumented apparently means people who overstay student Visas, even though they’ve married an American citizen and have Green Cards in the works. But going to check on your status can be dangerous too, as ICE workers wait at courthouses, and now churches and schools as well.
Deporting “dangerous and criminal illegals” is good, but not so much our ag workers, our health care, service industry and construction workers, our neighbors and fellow church goers. Arrests by ICE, detainment facilities, and deportations seem capricious—and chaotic.
I said “chaotic.” Chaos is the translation of fears as they become broader, personally and in the community as a whole: as to mask or not to mask, to vaccinate or not to vaccinate, to go to check on relatives in Mexico or not to go, to admit your sexual preferences or not to admit them, to join student protests against the killings in Gaza or to let them slide.
Add to vaccines the controversies over DEI; Birthright citizenship; the legal battles between the Administration and universities—and law firms; the flights of scientists and academics and foreign students out of the US; the squabbles with Canadians and Danes over US takeovers.
More on the international scene: the tariffs! And American Jews, students, and nations across the world deeply divided on Israel’s war on Gaza. The current failing food deliveries and accompanying riots and shootings in Gaza and on the West Bank can only be called chaos.
And where do we stand on Iran and Syria? Russia and Ukraine news too is in the background, unless you are a refugee from one of those countries.
We are living in a chaotic world. We’re likely to share some attitudes with one group but not another.! If we have “answers” to the issues mentioned here, they may not be the same as those of our friends on the left, right, or middle on any other issue We are not equally divided and we often don’t carry the same answers to the major challenges of the day as do our neighbors and relatives.
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In 1968, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite came back from a trip to Vietnam after TET, took his eyeglasses off to stare us in the eyes, and tell us that the Vietnam War was a failure, it was over. The TWO other networks joined in, and Republicans in power found their own ways to getting out of Vietnam. There were only three networks, and most Americans might watch one but knew all of them, especially Cronkite. It was not easy after Conkite’s declaration: Veterans were disparaged, and we still had years to end the War, and then had to live through Watergate, stagflation, and Clinton’s imbroglios. But we did move on, and it seemed that we could hand power back and forth between parties, grow the economy, improve relations with descendants of slaves, immigrant families, and the Native Americans we had been displacing for centuries
What we have now is a blizzard of views and news from all directions, People become entrenched in one or more absurd—or rational—narratives among the myriad of possibilities. We can only attend to so much, so we become vaccine partisans, or migration partisans, or political partisans—of splintering parties. Although we might agree with some people on many things, there are no longer clear divides that put large numbers of us on the same side on the ways to resolution of everything, We are a fractured public living in chaos.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who is quoted often these days, said that in a world of lies, truth is the casualty. Arendt (who said that the concentration camp functionary Adolf Eichmann was tested “normal” by many psychologists) chronicled the rise of totalitarian regimes. The “Thousand Year Reich,” she said, was as believable– or unbelievable–in Nazi Germany as your neighbor’s being here or gone the next day; the “truth” changed with Hitler’s whims and comments of the day.
In a world of chaos, what or who is there to hold onto? And what are the dangers of holding on?
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