Who is Driving This Bus?
What in tarnation is going on here in the United States of America? Is anyone driving this bus? Because it sure doesn’t feel like anyone is driving the bus.
Were we this collectively hateful during the late 1960s? I was a little too young then to assess the national mood. I do remember my sister Tricia coming into my room to tell me that Richard Nixon had been elected President. Didn’t make much difference to me. My green toy soldiers were green regardless of who was in the White House.
The late 60s was a time of great social unrest, of class and generational divide, of distrust, and opposition to a war that seemed to serve no strategic purpose. Citizens expressed their frustrations in many ways. They rioted. They protested and sat-in. They staged hunger strikes and, in extreme cases, they set themselves on fire. We hit bottom on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen fired on and killed four of their fellow countrymen during a protest at Kent State University. Was that the event that caused Americans to look around and think, “Hey man, what the hell is going on here? What are we doing?” That tragedy certainly eroded what little appetite Americans still had for waging a distant war in southeast Asia. The rifts brought on by the war and the domestic unrest it caused took time to heal, but they did heal.
Fast forward fifty-five years and it seems as though we have found our way back to that dark place. I have made a point of asking those who are old enough to remember whether what we are experiencing now is a parallel to the late 60s. Those who avoided the pharmacologically-induced memory loss that being a hippie in the 60s made them susceptible to give me an answer that is something like this:
The issues now aren’t the same as the issues then, but the national mood is just as bad. The distrust in our institutions is definitely worse, however.
I thought that was an interesting observation. What begat this loss of trust? The internet certainly was the vehicle, as it gave a mainstream platform to the conspiracy theorists who previously had existed on society’s fringes. What, though, was the seminal moment? Was it the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy? Bengazi? The Biden laptop? QAnon? The 2020 election? What was it? I suspect it was the sum total of the events of the past twenty years that finally caused people to throw up their hands and state that, yep, they are out to get me and nothing and nobody should be trusted. It has become much more convenient to embrace conspiracies than to accept personal responsibility. This is troubling, to say the least.
One thing is for sure. Donald Trump watered and fertilized the seeds of institutional doubt and brought them to full flower. There are millions and millions of Americans who agree with him about the 2020 election and just as many who believe that Donald Trump has been more damaging to this country than any elected official ever.
His "fake news" pronouncements gave an alibi to anyone who disagreed with anything they heard or read, even in the face of factual exactitude. In this new reality facts are subjective. This subjective bias is a social poison and is eroding the underpinnings of society.
In an opinion piece for the New York Times on January 18, 2020, Yuval Levin had this to say about the loss of faith in our institutions:
We trust political institutions when they undertake a solemn obligation to the public interest and shape the people who populate them to do the same. We trust a business because it promises quality and reliability and rewards its workers when they deliver those. We trust a profession because it imposes standards and rules on its members intended to make them worthy of confidence. We trust the military because it values courage, honor and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation and forms human beings who don‘t.We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy. This can happen through simple corruption, when an institution’s attempts to be formative fail to overcome the vices of the people within it, and it instead masks their treachery — as when a bank cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.
I would absolutely love to have the chance to sit down and talk with you. I am also dismayed at the state we are in.
ReplyDeleteVery well said Seward. However I believe you may have only scratched the surface of the level of deceit treachery that exists today in our political system
ReplyDeleteAs one of those who has avoided the "pharmacologically induced memory loss", by which you may mean "were so stoned all the time they don't remember", I can tell you that, while there are parallels to the late 60s & early 70s, the world is a much scarier place now.
ReplyDeleteThere were several revolutions happening in the late 60's--the "black revolution", the "student revolution" and soon after, the women's movement. They intersected sometimes, but mostly didn't. The student revolution was the one where there were sit-ins and protests and marches on Washington and peace vigils (every Sunday morning on the Amherst Common.) That movement was led by mostly white men, centered in institutions of higher learning, mostly in the big cities. It was a political movement, but
also a radical intellectual movement. Many of the protests took place at colleges--ie.
the take over of the admin offices at Columbia, University of Chicago, Berkeley. It was fueled by kids, who mistrusted 1.cops 2.big government 3. DOJ/FBI 4. anybody over 30. There were some radical violent fringes, but mostly the goal was peace and ending the war in Vietnam. The reason it all ended with Kent State is that we realized they could kill us.
I say that as if I were involved, which I mostly wasn't. As usual, I watched from the sidelines. I read the news. I participated in the teach-ins that happened after Kent State. That event shocked everybody. Thereafter, the student movement went home to lick its wounds and try to change institutions from the inside.
There was also the mounting assassination count. We had all been in middle school or early high school when JFK was shot. But then they shot MLK. Then they shot Bobby. Both of whom were (allegedly) peace lovers. It took its toll.
Sure, we shouted "Off the pigs." But I don't think it ever occurred to us to actually KILL them. Fight back when confronted, yeah. But for the most part, it was nonviolent protests. Very Mahatma Ghandi inspired.
It's the utter vitriol and spewing of hatred that is so concerning in today's world. The mentality of win/lose and retribution. And guns. Jesus, the guns.
I don't know. The 1960's and 70's were unsettling. But there wasn't this constant free-floating anxiety that at any moment somebody could wipe out the entire continent.
Glad to have stumbled upon your blog.
SEE. Facebook is good for something!
Beautifully stated Seward. You have such insight, instincts and talent. So grateful your sister Susan shared this with me. Keep on writing and keeping minds working. Kathy Smith
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