1968: What a Year It was!

A Photo I took in 1966 outside Nhr Trang

As the Democratic Convention unfurled this week in Chicago, everyone is comparing it to the 1968 convention in that same city. But for those who lived through it, the convention was but one example of how crazy 1968 was: It wasn’t just Chicago: the whole year was a house on fire, exploding with unprecedented chaos. 

Here’s how I remember it. 

I was a returning Vietnam vet, getting out of the service on February 3, 1968, the bloodiest year of that seemingly endless war.  Four days earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched the infamous Tet Offensive in Nha Trang, a place in Vietnam I knew well. 

Tet, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end of that meat-grinder of a conflict, sacrificing the lives of 58,000 young Americans, while Vietnam, counting civilians, lost a staggering three million^⁠1. Tet was a turning point, prompting CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,”^⁠2  to finally confirm that Vietnam was an unwinnable debacle. 

As if to buttress that claim, the photograph that won the 1968  Pulitzer Prize, graphically depicted a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong prisoner. A quote by an Army major during Tet aptly summarized the damage we were doing to  that small, third-world nation: Referring to a town he and his troops were trying to retake:  “We had to destroy it to save it.”^⁠3

Then, the My Lai massacre happened on March 16. US ground troops from Charlie Company rampaged through the hamlet of My Lai

killing more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, from infants to the elderly.

The Vietnam War caused a degree of polarization drawfing anything we are seeing today, including upending the presidential election. A virtual unknown, Eugene McCarthy, came within 230 votes of defeating Lyndon Johnson in NH. 

I happened to be watching Johnson give his address on March 31 when he unexpectedly – and shockingly – announced his decision not to seek reelection because of poor polling numbers.

 That starkly contrasts with President Biden, who had to be forced by his fellow Democrats to stand down. I’ve always had a soft spot for Johnson. He thought getting involved in a land war in Asia was folly but was talked into it to avoid being accused of being soft on communism.

There is this touching story, probably apocryphal, that he went down to the operations room in the White House at 4 AM each day to see how many of ‘my boys’ had been killed that day. The weight of Vietnam weighed him down, resulting in his premature death, a broken man.

On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis by James Earl Ray, sparking riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many others. Early in the morning of June, on the night of the California Primary, RFK was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, apparently angered at several pro-Isreali speeches Kennedy had made during the campaign.

On August 26, Mayor Richard Daley opened the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Demonstrations were initially peaceful but became increasingly violent over the next two days. By most accounts, on Wednesday evening, Chicago police took action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and sent at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175.

On October 3, George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, running an independent campaign for president, named retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay as his running mate. 

When the general was asked about his position on the use of nuclear weapons, he responded: "I think most military men think it's just another weapon in the arsenal... I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.” When Trump was president, like LeMay, he failed to understand why we couldn’t use our atomic weapons.

The Democratic convention will be over by the time you read this. While there are parallels with the 1968 convention, this one should be peaceful and healing for the party and the country.

The biggest danger is how to handle Gaza. If President Biden fails to rein in Netanyahu and demand a ceasefire, he may ignite a regional war in the Middle East, which would be disastrous for Israelis, Palestinians, and the Democrat’s chances of winning in November.

xxx

¹ https://study.com/academy/lesson/casualties-of-the-vietnam-war-causes-statistics.html#:~:text=The%20Vietnam%20War%20began%20in,of%20200%2C000%20South%20Vietnamese%20soldiers.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite

³ This 1968 timeline is where I got much of my information:

https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html

 

The Paradoxes of Tribalism

 

CC Jean Stimmell

I had an epiphany watching Kamala Harris’s first campaign rally in Atlanta: It came to me that tribalism can be a good thing, a position I would have previously considered unthinkable. In fact, I will go further and admit that I now feel tribalism has some major advantages over rational, intellectual discourse – along with potential dreadful liabilities.

I confess I got so carried away listening to the rally that I found myself chanting along with the crowd. I felt as if one with Harris and her rapt audience. What was happening to me, the reserved, bookish person I usually am?

Obviously, becoming one with the audience is not a solitary, individual response but flows out of community. It was in the air around me: it was emotional and transformational. Indeed, it was “tribal.”

I’m not the only one to feel this surge: my friends and acquaintances tell me they are feeling it, too. (Of course, the MAGA folks have long felt it. But that is a story for another time.) Michelle Goldberg, NYT columnist, calls the Harris excitement “infectious.”

She quotes a Harris rallygoer, who is a pediatrician: “Things can happen and turn around in just a moment that can change everything. And I feel like that’s what’s happened. And this is not only a political movement. This is a social movement. This is an inflection point. And this is, to me, a spiritual movement.”^⁠1

Goldberg thinks this excitement at the Atlanta rally could be “really durable:” “The reason is that people underestimate how much of getting involved in politics has to do with becoming part of a real-life social movement, making those connections, joining those groups, being in community.”

I agree. This type of public campaigning in the town square is an excellent example of an oral tradition, harkening back to the first humans who gathered together in dangerous circumstances for support and protection. 

This ancient oral tradition is fundamentally different from what came later: the written word.

Oral societies are social by nature. They are most often associated with indigenous people, who are considered primitive by today’s standards. Cultures that live by the written word are a modern development, valuing the individual over society. They are thought to be more sophisticated and reliable in our modern world.

Whether we follow an oral or a written tradition has huge consequences: it determines how we view reality.

 Walter Ong, an American Jesuit priest, English professor, and cultural historian, is a fascinating character and an acknowledged expert on this subject. His major interest was how changing from orality to literacy influenced culture and human consciousness.^⁠2

While he agreed that so-called illiterate Indigenous people did not think in abstractions, he demonstrated that they enjoyed a major, complementary strength: they were intimately connected to the physical world around them. In other words, they were mindful, living in the present, totally in tune with the rhythms of Mother Nature.

This illuminates a fundamental difference in the group dynamics between oral and print cultures.

 As Ong notes, “when a speaker addresses an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again.”^⁠3

The difference is stark: an oral culture brings people together, while a print-oriented culture like ours pulls people apart.^⁠4 That’s why political rallies can be such high-octane unifiers.

But they come with a warning…

Rallies are a potent way to build community but come with the ever-present danger of ceding control to a charismatic dictator like Hitler who would command absolute power at the expense of our individual freedom and inviolable human rights.

 xxx

Photo Credit: I took this photo at Hampton Beach on Christmas Day 2014.

Footnotes:

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/opinion/kamala-harris-president-support.html?showTranscript=1

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong

³ https://archive.org/stream/OngWalterOralityAndLiteracy/Ong%20Walter%20%2C%20orality%20and%20literacy_djvu.txt

⁴ https://blogs.ubc.ca/shaminakallu/2015/01/16/assignment-13-oral-vs-written-cultures-the-imagined-binary-question-1/

Welcoming the Other

 

CC Jean Stimmell– August 2nd, 2024

Like deja vu all over again, today’s burning issues are the same as those two generations ago. That much became apparent to me from reading a 1995 interview with Allen Ginsberg, a well-known poet and 1960s guru who highlighted a nagging paradox: “How can you maintain your civilized world when everybody else is starving?^⁠1 “

Since he wrote that, things have only gotten worse: the disconnection between our aspirations and our actions has become ever more extreme.

Take immigration for example. Ginsberg, back in 1995, declared that our root problem is how we demonize immigration: “There are civil wars in foreign countries, in Latin America, Africa, which are taking place on the streets of America too. Demagoguery about homogeneity and immigration are taking place… How much immigration can you stand?… All these arguments about how much we restrain hoards from countries we wrecked from taking refuge here.”

He says the biggest thing about immigration that we miss – the elephant in the room – is our lack of compassion for the plight of refugees. Today, the problem has expanded to include the ever-increasing homelessness in our midst.

Record income inequality has hollowed out the middle class, causing more and more of us not to be able to make the mortgage payment or the rent, and consequently, adding to the rising tide of the dispossessed.

Worse yet, the recent Supreme Court decision has made it illegal to sleep in public. Manchester and Concord have already passed laws to punish this behavior with fines of several hundred dollars for the first offense. If the homeless had that kind of cash sitting around, they probably wouldn’t be homeless in the first place.

Indeed, where is our compassion for our neighbors? For Ginsberg, compassion requires a spiritual orientation, something increasingly absent in our dog-eat-dog world, which praises “survival of the fittest” millionaires like Elon Musk most often.

David Brooks recently addressed this crippling dysfunction through the lens of James Davison’s new book Democracy and Solidarity, addressing the cultural roots of this disconnection,^⁠2

Davison points out that a fundamental tension has broken down that has long defined America: It is between the Founding  Father’s rational Enlightenment ideas about liberty and the divine ideals of Christianity. He writes that throughout our history, we have prospered living with one ear attuned to each tradition: 

“If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.”

Tragically, he writes this fruitful cultural tension died with King. As a result, since the 1960s, America has grown less religious, which explains America’s increasing polarization: We have lost our former set of moral foundations to settle disputes.”In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together.” 

According to Brooks, the solution to this unraveling is to renew our spiritual foundations: “My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”

I agree with Brooks that societies absolutely require a coherent moral foundation. From my studies in sociology, I’m aware that every society, going back into the mists of time, has had at least five essential institutions: religion, education, family, economy, and government(political). Human beings are social animals and can’t live without these institutions.

Even science has even gotten on board, touting the centrality of spirituality in our lives!

Theorists like Neil Theise assert that consciousness is the fundamental element in the universe, not material things. He is following the lead of Max Planck, the famous quantum physicist from the early 20^th century who said this directly: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”^⁠3

According to Theise’s poetic description, “Our brains aren't fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.^⁠4”

I’d say that’s a pretty powerful endorsement of spirituality. We are all one, embodying the ever-present consciousness of the universe, an entity that many would call God.

xxx

¹ https://tricycle.org/magazine/spontaneous-intelligence/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=922d9bea48-Daily_Dharma_07_3_2024_Subs&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-922d9bea48-309926126

² https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/opinion/trump-biden-authoritarianism.html

³ –Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition. P. 89

⁴ Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 153). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.