Just watched Tom Brokaw’s “1968” this week and it was quite thought provoking. David Hinckley’s review of the same gets it right, though. Hinckley, of the NYTimes, noted that "1968 doesn't lack integrity, interest or insight. It just stops short of exploring the questions that could move the chains from where the discussion left off a few years ago when media attention started shifting from the '60s to the '70s and '80s.”The biggest insight of the program for me, which aired on the History Channel and is now available in DVD, came in the first two minutes or less. There was a draft in 1968, and the unpopular war mattered to everyone in every part of the country because, well, we were all potentially eligible to go, or our friends and brothers were on the line. It was a very different time. It was not so easy to disregard what was happening. "Something's happening here" affected all of us.
Today’s war is nonesuch. Sure, it has an impact on some people somewhere, but young people can get lost in their video games and iPods and beer parties and online social networks without once encountering a direct hit with someone whose life is actually touched by it all. And the rest can be lulled to sleep by the television shows, movies, sports, fishing, and other assorted distractions.
Add to the war the racial tensions, all sublimated today by comparison. Men like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King took bullets for a dream, which vaporized to some extent. Cities burned, but it was the ghetto homes that were destroyed and charred, and white America pretty much escaped unscathed.
Brokaw’s 1968 ended with NASA’s year-end achievement showing astronauts circumnavigating the moon, but it was not an event that mesmerized like the 1969 moonwalk, and it hardly addressed the real questions that flummoxed this nation.
My guess is that historians will continue arguing about the meaning of 1968 till the day it’s forgotten altogether. One thing is certain, there was a lot of anxiety going down. And whatever story you’ve heard about any facet of the sixties undoubtedly has another side, and another, and another. Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
Today’s war is nonesuch. Sure, it has an impact on some people somewhere, but young people can get lost in their video games and iPods and beer parties and online social networks without once encountering a direct hit with someone whose life is actually touched by it all. And the rest can be lulled to sleep by the television shows, movies, sports, fishing, and other assorted distractions.Add to the war the racial tensions, all sublimated today by comparison. Men like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King took bullets for a dream, which vaporized to some extent. Cities burned, but it was the ghetto homes that were destroyed and charred, and white America pretty much escaped unscathed.
Brokaw’s 1968 ended with NASA’s year-end achievement showing astronauts circumnavigating the moon, but it was not an event that mesmerized like the 1969 moonwalk, and it hardly addressed the real questions that flummoxed this nation.
My guess is that historians will continue arguing about the meaning of 1968 till the day it’s forgotten altogether. One thing is certain, there was a lot of anxiety going down. And whatever story you’ve heard about any facet of the sixties undoubtedly has another side, and another, and another. Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
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