Letters to the Editor
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1968 - From January to December
I was a sophomore and junior at a well-regarded public HS in what would become the Rust Belt, but so far was tarnished only by the industrial pollution that then characterized "prosperity." Mine was the first class in which blacks were bussed into white neighborhoods' schools, in hopes of achieving a dream of a "Great Society," but whose execution turned into a nightmare of resentment, permissiveness and abandoned standards of conduct across the social spectrum. The graduates we regularly sent to the Ivy League were replaced by drug dealers and unwed mothers, and our homecoming football games degenerated into gunplay and killing fields as blacks became the majority in our once-esteemed school system. Not pretty, not PC - but true.
In April, I attended my first rock concert, the Cream and Mothers of Invention at the Chicago Coliseum. I remember a fan reaching up on stage as the bands set up and, reaching for greatness, touching a drum, only to have Ginger Baker hammer his hand with such force that he surely broke bones, sending the fan running and yowling in pain. A taste of things to come with Hells Angels at Altamont, if not Jonestown. The auditorium reeked of pot, and it gave my friends and me sore throats for a few days. We didn't smoke cigarettes, so we never even thought about smoking pot.
The night MLK was shot some friends and I had gone swimming at the downtown YMCA, located across, and soon in, the "colored district." One of our dads came to pick us all up and we were all nervous as we traversed the ghetto back to our white, well-kept working class neighborhood. The riots came later, and the first - and worst - of the concessions to anarchy and black demogoguery followed soon after.
We got word of RFK's death in journalism class, taught by an intelligent and politically active man who frequently spoke of "The Smothers Brothers Show" and regularly took the Chicago Trubune to task for presuming to call itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper." He broke down and cried, and some of us students did, too. But not so mournfully, perhaps; we all remembered learning of JFK's death on the afternoon playgounds of grade school, and were starting to become inured to such things.
The Democrats' convention in Chicago gave me mixed feelings. I respected RJDaley as the man who made "The City That Works" work, but his thuggish cops repulsed me. Worse, though, I felt, were the demonstrators who antagonized them. For all their intellectual and clever carping and caviling, they seemed remarkably short on solutions or expressing their ideas in a constructive manner. They appeared more about what came to be called "acting out" the personal frustrations of spoiled social misfits, than seriously working for positive change. It was my first inkling of left-wing hypocrisy and vapidity.
I didn't like Nixon because my smokestack Demo dad despised him, and I still retained enough respect for him that I followed his political views, though I matured into a law-and-order Libertarian while he still draws nourishment from his FDR-inspired roots. But there was something too timid about HHH, something I later saw revealed in all its grossly inadequate lack of grandeur when Jimmy Carter was elected as the anti-Nixon. As dishonest and crooked as Nixon was, at least he had the backbone to deal with aggression, which in Carter's case was limited to disappointing the dreams of distance runners and decathletes.
Vietnam was getting worse, but I was still two years shy of 18, and so not directly affected by its consequences, though I knew guys who'd gone off to that war and not returned. I was just starting to think about where I wanted to go to college, and never considered any of the service academies, nor any religious schools, having suffered through two years of Catholic grade school before my parents, thankfully, pulled me out. But when the time came for me to register for the draft, I willingly did so, having studied history and going on to major in it in college, and therefore having an understanding of both the social contract and the need to fight to protect it when necessary. When my lottery was held in the Summer of '71, I drew no. 8 - and within a year enlisted in the USN because I could not in good conscience go to Canada or otherwise abandon the responsibilities I saw due from me to my country that, for all its inconsistencies and weaknesses, is still the best that's ever existed as a nation on earth.