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In reply to the discussion: 1968 (Your Help, Please!) [View all]Hekate
(90,565 posts)Last edited Fri Aug 1, 2014, 03:59 AM - Edit history (1)
There's a part of me that has never recovered, and it's why I held my breath during so much of Barack Obama's campaign in 2008. I still fear for him. I don't understand the hatred and contempt some express here -- don't they know hatred has consequences for our people?
I was in community college in So Cal and my friends and I ran the McCarthy for President HQ in our town. No point in a campus office because the majority of the students in jr. college were under 21, so we were interacting with settled adults as it were. The day after the election we did have the satisfaction of finding out we had won the district we had worked so hard in, but really all hope was gone with Bobby's loss.
We hung around the HQ all by ourselves watching the donated TV until about 10:00 pm, when it was totally obvious McCarthy had lost California. I went home to my little apartment and listened to my transistor radio until the battery died. I didn't know about the assassination until the next morning, when I went downstairs to "do up" for the elderly couple who owned the house, and found the two of them sitting stunned in front of their TV. With them I watched Mankiewizc age a thousand years on camera.
Damnation it hurts to remember this. Now I've got tears on my glasses.
During the summer I moved back in with my parents while I got ready to transfer from community college to University of Hawai'i, which had accepted me in the first place just before we moved to California. It was in my parents' living room that I watched the Chicago Convention and the riots outside it, shaking and in disbelief. My friend who had recruited me to work on the McCarthy campaign had friends who were there, so we got an almost-first-hand account of the police riots. My friend's friend was in an office when the cops broke in and slammed him up against the file cabinets.
The day I went to the Los Angeles Airport to catch my flight Home I saw people deplaning from a Chicago flight. They were wearing black armbands.
I couldn't take living on the Mainland any more. The summer we moved to California the Watts Riots broke out. Then it was one assassination and riot after another, and I thought to myself how can people live like this?! I was just a kid from some islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I never ever wanted to live on the Mainland by then, and indeed it was over a decade before I returned to California to stay.
I haven't been able to watch much of the series, although it is well done. I've been afraid of doing what I'm doing now, I guess, which is sobbing.
I saw part of the episode on Hubert Humphrey last week and that man's fate just wrenched my heart all over again. He was a good man, and he didn't deserve what happened to him at LBJ's hands -- or Nixon's. LBJ was a good man but flawed; he even had greatness in him though he did some mistaken things and some very bad things. Nixon was just evil.
postscript: Almost redundant to say 1968 absolutely affected the rest of my life. My parents just didn't talk about politics much in the home. I do. I'm a Democrat, period. I'm a feminist. I'm pro-choice. I believe in Affirmative Action. I've worked, picketed, served for all these things. All of this grew out of my activities in 1968.