With the stroke of a pen last week, a frazzled sense of decency and in the spirit of compromise, President Biden might have signed modern democracy’s death warrant. The bill that sent more military aid to Israel is a fuse likely to ignite a firestorm from the toxic atmosphere of incomprehensible violence and hate, greed and power that envelops the Earth.
It’s all horribly reminiscent of 1968, but with major, intensifying factors. Hundreds of millions more weapons of war are on the streets and mostly in the hands of those who support “military” solutions to America’s complex problems. A giant Far Right has conditioned them to believe that winning is everything. It excuses the most undemocratic, unpatriotic and abhorrent behavior. The leader of the Republican party has endorsed the most heinous acts using the language of thugs and mobsters.
We’ve shriveled the Constitution’s commitment to form a “more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, … secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” into power grabs and infotainment. An impotent press and corporate interest-driven media leave us with the shallowest notion of truth. We have no common vision, experience or even facts.
The crux of the debate most visibly centered on college campuses is the eons long conflicts perpetrated by Arabs, Jews and Christians in modern day Israel and Palestine.
The current crisis began with a brutal, surprise attack by Hamas on Israel Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas killed 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250. In response, Israel launched a murderous air and land attack on Gaza and blocked humanitarian aid from reaching millions of civilians trapped there. So far 34,300 Gazans, 17,000 of them children, have died either from Israeli bombing, starvation or untreated medical issues. That’s out of a population of 2.1 million, mostly packed into an area about twice the size of D.C. Israel plans another attack on Gaza that targets Rafah, where the world has established a safe haven for more than a million refugee victims of the war. The United States has provided tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel since Oct. 7 as well as humanitarian aid. The civilian carnage continues with Israel holding up humanitarian assistance, even bombing international aid volunteers and failing to disclose plans to the U.S. of how they will protect civilians in Rafah.
The war in Gaza is but one of the divisive issues boiling in the U.S. The Old Left is miserable that the causes in which we invested our lives and freedom have evaporated: Fair elections, universal suffrage, multicultural civil rights, gender and LGBTQIA+ rights, economic equality, abortion rights, equal pay, environmental sanity, child safety, hunger, homelessness, corporate responsibility. Young Americans now face rebuilding all that while coping with new disasters: a pandemic that shattered their social and educational worlds, a world literally on fire and in flood at the same time, dilapidated and outdated infrastructure, mass shootings in their schools. The challenges go on and on.
1968 was a particularly chaotic year. We lost Dr. King and Robert Kennedy to assassins. With the draft to supply Vietnam War cannon fodder, young men got college acceptances or draft notices with their high school diplomas. Anti-war protests and riots broke out across the country in the early spring. More followed after Dr. King’s assassination in nearly 100 American cities. Police shot and killed three students and wounded 28 others in Orangeburg, S.C., during a peaceful civil rights demonstration in February. Peaceful protestors across the country were frustrated that their words were falling on deaf ears. So some began to raise their voices and fists.
LBJ, to his credit, saw the writing on the wall and stepped out of the race for a second full term. He bore the blame for ordering escalation of the war and he did not want to saddle Democrats with a compromised candidate at the top of the ticket. However, Democrats managed to compromise their ticket anyway by nominating Hubert Humphrey, who was less popular with younger Democrats then than Biden is today.
As they will this year, Democrats held their national convention in Chicago in 1968. Leaders on the Left brought masses of peace freaks, Yippies, Hippies, Black Panthers, SCLC, SNCC and other grassroots groups to Chicago to convince DNC delegates to nominate Sen. Eugene McCarthy as the standard bearer for a peace and civil rights platform. The DNC would not listen. Boss Mayor Richard Dailey turned city police, the Ohio National Guard and other forces on the demonstrators camping in the park.
The result was three days of what the National Commission on Causes and Prevention of Violence determined was a “police riot.” The nation was treated to television footage of tanks with barbed wire cages on front pushing demonstrators into the park. The scene was a near perfect replica of Russians advancing into Czechoslovakia at the same moment. Police in riot gear, wielding batons and tear gas, beat unarmed, peaceful kids in Grant Park who chanted, “The whole world’s watching! The whole world’s watching!”
Humphrey lost. Richard Nixon won. The Democratic Party was weakened for decades. Evil and violent forces got emboldened. The past 25 years they have organized, strengthened, waiting underground in noisome alliances. Above ground, they’ve gained near insurmountable power in key states. They tested the surface with the Tea Party and blowing up the Murrah Building, then found their leader in 2010 or so. Jan. 6, 2021, they learned that nearly half the country would abide any conduct to gain power. We don’t even have to guess what they’ll do if the GOP leader wins the next election. He’s already told us: Autocracy on Day 1, removing or murdering his rivals, replacing our mutual government with his personal staff, changing all the rules of the game.
Liberal and leftist young people are protesting because the country’s leaders are not listening to them. They are frustrated. They do not want any part of killing children across the globe. They’re tired of their Constitutional rights being shredded. Democrats must give them a candidate they are excited to vote for. Last Wednesday, President Biden said all Americans have the right to be heard, but not create chaos. I wonder what he has actually heard from them. He has a vested interest in truly listening as does the Democratic Party.
A big difference between 1968 student demonstrators and activists today is these folks have the VOTE. That’s three years’ more young voters than in 1968, when the voting age was 21, not 18. That’s tens of millions more young people with enfranchisement. Give them a reason to use it enthuisiastically. They will save us.
© Kathy Williams
May 3, 2024
Dedicated to our sister Roxy N. Melody Dorsey.
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