40 Years Ago
23 August 2008 - 23 אב 5768 by Huw
PR today was filled with reminiscences of Chicago in 1968. This AM, listening to Morning Edition, I was overcome with the emotions I was feeling. I was flooded with feelings. Strange. I spent a good part of the morning doing a sort of self-analysis: even walking to the coffee shop to process caused me to nearly cry.
In 1968 I was nearly 4 (my birthday was after the convention). The news stories about demonstrators who were bashed, gassed, beat-up and otherwise destroyed by Chicago police at the behest of polite, “liberal” Democrats and Mayor RJ Daley were broadcast live into the homes of everyone in America and around the world. This use of the TV as propaganda tool was intended exactly to intimidate and terrorise anyone who dared to speak up against the Gov’t’s powers. It is a message burned on whatever tiny part of my brain was turning on at that time: police can’t be trusted. A uniform is a sure sign of terror about to be inflicted. Gov’t is a lie and all we can do is subvert, ignore and run away.
40 years ago the Democrats sucked up to authoritarianism, colluding (maybe accidentally) in the election of RM Nixon and, setting up the next 40 years of Republican power (there’s only been 2 years of Democrat power since 1968). The events of that August led directly to multi-national corporations swallowing our freedoms and destroying our planet, and oil companies enslaving us and sending us off to war to defend them. The religious right has presided over it all offering a benediction on not only our destruction, but also a malediction on anyone who dared to question participation in the social contract of capitalism and the religious left has offered a polite counterpoint to prick our conscience but never pulling us out of the system and never offering us the tools to overthrow it. Instead the religious Left keeps trying to play with the same gov’t that has never once proved itself capable of living in the Kingdom because, at heart, it’s the same Gov’t that beat up kids in 1968 for exercising free speech. All that gov’t can do is throw crumbs around to keep the religious left addicted to the game.
40 years ago, a child learned to fear the people he’d been taught to trust: pretty much everyone.
