Will 2020 Be Our 1968?
Meaning: Will it be the year that none of us ever shut up about?
1968 occupies roughly the same place in hippie folklore that the birth of Jesus does in Christianity. I once had a gray-haired record store clerk bend my ear about what a transformational year it was. “It was the Summer of Love!” he exclaimed. It was not: 1967 was the Summer of Love. “Crazy times — Woodstock, the Manson murders,” wrong again, both 1969, but this guy was such an authentic hippie that highly precise memory would have actually made him less credible. I honestly would have just politely nodded if he had said “1968! Sputnik, the Spice Girls, Jack the Ripper taught Helen Keller to read. There's a reason they called it The Reformation, my friend!”
1968 did contain several seismic events in American political history. January saw the launch of the Tet Offensive, which was the first time many Americans realized that victory in Vietnam wasn’t close at hand. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April, sparking riots in more than 100 cities. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was killed in the thick of the Democratic primary, and the Democratic National Convention in August was marked by more chaos and rioting. Politics overlapped with sports; Muhammad Ali’s exile from boxing continued as he refused to be drafted, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a black power salute at the Olympics. There was also a pandemic, a narrowly-decided presidential election, and Joe Biden achieved higher office in an election in which his age was an issue.
