1968: The Year That Changed Everything
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.
© 2007


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Member Comments
Posted By: irishoneeye @ 03/31/2008 7:16:17 PM
Comment: In 1968, I was overseas in the US Army. The US looked like a mess from there. When I returned, I was spat on and called a "Baby Killer." I hadn't gone to Vietnam. The only thing that my unit was to put Man on the Moon. It made me realize how little the hippies really knew.
Posted By: nottheonly1 @ 03/22/2008 3:33:02 PM
Comment: Please spare us the chauvinistic bigotry and go back to inventing the wheel, caveman...
Posted By: discogirl @ 02/16/2008 7:28:09 PM
Comment: 1968.... I was 7 years-old. Funny how few articles begin, "1978." But then the bottom of the Baby Boom has never mattered much to the media or scholars. Our realities were certainly not the same.