The Summer of Our Discontent

Posted by Frank W. Hardy Aug 7, 2008

I look back to a time when things seemed so different. I was finishing school and in a few years found myself in the USAF as Tet raged throughout a mysterious, far off land called Vietnam! My world consisted of post WW2 and the birth of the suburbs. The bedroom communities - the Levittowns of America!

A strong economy saw millions of Americans move into the middle class. Apollo 8 had the first humans see the far side of the moon and an unpopular President was leaving office.

Somehow history remembers the summer of 1968 negatively! Was the reason, the USA was involved in an unpopular war or maybe the riots from New York to Los Angeles were the causes? Was it the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations? Something was amiss; the nation was divided.

Joe McCarthy was denounced; however, his "Red Menace" legacy lived on. Communists were doing their "Domino Theory" part with the capture of the USS Pueblo by North Korea, the mysterious sinking of the submarine Scorpion and the Soviet's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Anxiety flourished! Although 180 nations signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the French tested their first thermonuclear bomb. Civil rights protests in Northern Ireland set the stage for 26 years of Civil War and German riots created boarder angst between Soviet and American forces.

What was it?. Astronaut Jim Lovell said while orbiting the moon, "When you see the earth from the moon, you realize how fragile it is....We're all astronauts on this spaceship Earth...and we have to work and live together,"

How profound those words are today with another unpopular President, war, secrecy, changing economy, Al Qaeda bogeymen, nuclear threats, economic paradigms and global warming.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana.