Making History is hard work. I thought we had some interesting times in the post-Vietnam era, the two Superpowers glaring at each other. Now it is everywhere, and we have a man in the Presidency who sinks his ship and then brags about how cool the lifeboats are.

We have talked about 1968 a couple times. It was a heady experience, and one for which we Detroiters had a convincing prelude. 1967 was an attention grabber. Maybe the tension was already high, I don’t know. I was sixteen, driving, and had been a teen-age product of the JFK murder and the kinetic fury that visited politics in the first part of that amazing decade. Our thing in Detroit was allegedly about the police rousting a “Blind Pig” unregistered party site, but which was about change in the city. We had a tradition in the Motor City- one of the biggest riots in national history happened back in ’43. This one was about the tension between a desire for strong law enforcement and legitimate discontent on housing. We wound up with 43 dead citizens and the 101st Airborne as guests.

Emotion comes back with that, but it was just a prelude to what happened across the country in 1968. The murder of Dr. King kicked it off in April and the summer cooked suddenly across what seemed to be all of America’s cities. The top six included Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, DC, Pittsburgh and our Detroit reprise of summer violence. I hadn’t thought about it seriously until a few weeks ago. Last summer’s rash of violence had a bit of the flavor of it, but it didn’t connect directly. Now it does. The way I feel now, a little wary and distrustful, is something I had managed to bury years ago. But not now.

The Week? That must have contributed to the feeling. The Administration is providing an hour-by-hour demonstration of their inability to communicate internally. Some of the controversy stems from the apparent fact that the careful coaching for the public appearances freezes the President in the moment in time his script was written. The world being anything but static, everything else just moves on, but he is stuck with where and what he was provided.

Not having been around for the Wilson Administration and his wife Edith’s regency a century ago, I am not sure how this version goes on in the continuing crisis in which we seem to be operating.

I thought things could not get stranger than 1968. I think I am going to reassess that view. It is going to be in a history of our own making.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com