I just finished reading 1968. The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky. 1968 was the year to be alive--there just hasn't been a year like it since. It was the year of "sex, drugs, rock and roll, the assassinations of Marthin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, the Prague Spring, the antiwar movement and the Tet offensive, Black Power, the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the feminist movement," etc. So many cataclysmic movements were imploding on our lives at one time.
There is just something about living through 1968. Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident, said: "I can recognize a sixty-eighter in a second. It is not the politics. It is a way of thinking. I met Bill Clinton and I could see he was one." I think Michnik captured the year in the phrase, "a way of thinking"--a new world view was erupting in the midst of all of the social, political, and cultural changes.
For the first time I reflected on the totality of the year I experienced from a more distant, historic perspective. When you are living a year and experiencing events, one has perspective, but it is not seasoned with historic insight. So much was happening in 1968 that it was overwhelming, but at the time everything seemed somehow normal. It was hard to separate the trivial from the consequential. Vietnam was very real. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was painful to me and I had a sense of its impact. But slogans like "Beautify America, Get a Haircut" represented a deeper values change that many of us just laughed off.
The quote by a French student at the Sorbonne in 1968 probably applies: "Professors, you are as old as your culture."
1 comment:
"1968, the year to be alive". Looking at that list of things, I cannot doubt their historical significance, but I wonder that a person would intently desire to be a part of them. Very few have positive connotations at least in my mind.
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