I recently subscribed to Stonekettle Station,
as recommended by a friend. This is long,
but worth the read....and worth remembering.
Greatness, Again
Posted: 19 Sep 2016 08:57 PM PDT
You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
-- Charlie Manson
I saw George Wallace speak once.
Yes, that George Wallace.
George Corley Wallace, Jr. the infamous governor of Alabama.
Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever! That George Wallace.
It was 1972. I was ten years old. Wallace was once again running for President of the United States, this time as a Democrat.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This really begins four years previous, in 1968.
You nowadays hear people talking about the current election as the worst they’ve ever seen, the worst in American history.
But 2016 has nothing on 1968.
I was very young then, of course. And while a child, even one as bright and perceptive as yours truly (heh heh), can’t understand the complexities of the world around him in any great detail, that child can and does feel the emotional currents. A child might not understand why men are rioting in the streets, why buildings are burning and people are dying, but that child can see the uncertainty in the faces of his parents at the dinner table every night. He can sense the undercurrent of fear on the evening news even if he doesn’t have the maturity to understand why the screen is filled with burning helicopters and falling bombs and hard-eyed soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam. That child can feel the tension in the world because it’s everywhere like a foul miasma of nameless, shapeless dread.
And I remember it, the simmering fear and the rage of that time.
It was everywhere.
Continues here