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1968 - The Year That Changed Everything - Newsweek
I rarely read Newsweek, but found THIS article written by Johnathan Darman rather interesting (it is 3 pages but well worth the read, and the audio supplement to the lower right is good as well). It is definitely written from an American standpoint, but raises some global issues, especially the cultural and political events that influenced the world.
It basically says that the 60's was modern society's defining decade, and that everything we do or aspire to do, consciously or subconsciously, politically or practically, gets compared to the ideals, culture and events of the 1960's, and the year that rose above all the others during the 1960's - 1968 (Bobby Kennedy's assassination leaving behind ideals that never saw th light of day, Martin Luther King's assasination sparking a renewed racial scepticism, Lyndon Johnson pulling out of the presidential race after the travesty of Vietnam - only to form the policy of today's Iraq, etc.).
Some excerpts:
Quote:
But what about the rest of us? Nearly 162 million Americans were born after Dec. 31, 1969. More than half the country, then, knows the decade only through mythology (peace, love and liberation) or through marketing (tie-dyed T shirts at tourist shops, the Rolling Stones on oldies radio, Dennis Hopper in Ameriprise Financial ads). They rightly question what makes the '60s so special: What, after all, did the baby boomers really achieve 40 years ago? Why does NEWSWEEK commemorate 1968 instead of 1918 or 1941?
The answer: because all of us, young and old, are stuck in the '60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against. As the pages that follow demonstrate, the '60s were not necessarily, as some baby boomers would have it, America's defining moment. But they were an era when a generation held sustained argument over the things that have always mattered most: How should America show its power in the world? What rights were owed to African-Americans, to women, to gays? What is America and what does it want to be?
These were noble questions. The debate they brought on was not. Rather, it was personal, hysterical and often terrifying. Father fought with son, black fought with white, the young fought with the old. By the end of the decade, consensus was clearly not possible, and simply restoring civilization became the goal. Subsequent generations would have to answer those essential questions.
Quote:
Already, the old '60s fault lines are emerging in the 2008 campaign. Earlier this fall, Mitt Romney released a Web advertisement starring the candidate's wife, talking about the trials she faced as a stay-at-home mother to five sons. "Sometimes I'd be home with those five boys, and it was rough," Ann Romney says in the ad. "He'd call home and remind me that what I was doing was much more important than what he was doing." The ad was meant to introduce Republican primary voters to Romney's family, but it shows what could be a compelling narrative for a general election campaign: family values versus free love, the order and comfort of the '50s versus the trauma and extremism of the '60s.
This old choice will not be hard for Republicans to revive if the Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton. Clinton's '60s baggage is all around her—her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech, the pictures of big glasses and love beads, the libertine husband, the daughter they named after a Joni Mitchell song.
Fifteen years in the national spotlight has taught Clinton to be wary of invoking the '60s, lest she seem like the feminist agitator her critics have made her out to be. But when provoked, she, too, falls back on '60s vernacular as she demonstrated earlier this month, when she called presidential politics an "all-boys club" after a weak performance in a Democratic debate.
Quote:
So how do we finally escape the '60s in time for the election of the next president, 40 years after 1968? Not, as Obama would have it, by simply declaring the '60s done. Too many politicians have tried that before, only to be proved wrong, either by the boomer electorate or their own lingering '60s souls.
The real way to move beyond the '60s is to have political leaders who are finally willing to do an honest accounting of what that fateful decade was truly about. If the civil-rights movement truly transformed America, why are our cities still segregated? If women were liberated by the '60s, why do working mothers still feel so chained down? If Vietnam taught us how to be a humble superpower, why are we still bogged down in Iraq?
These will all be vital questions facing the next president. The story of 1968 demonstrates that the truly brave presidential candidate will be he, or she, who finally acknowledges the '60s have everything, not nothing, to do with us.
Probably a bit much for OTF around lunchtime, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss which decade, year or event you think has defined the world we live in today? Or do you think it is an incremental evolution where every decade has played an important part?
11-19-2007, 01:18 PM
1968 - The Year That Changed Everything - Newsweek Post #2
1968 - The Year That Changed Everything - Newsweek 
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