Dissent

It is an election year. America is fighting a war in a far-off land — a war that seems without end. On the nightly news there are scenes of racial unrest in the streets of American cities. There are demonstrations and protests. Two presidential candidates are running for president, and neither is very popular with most voters. The Republican candidate will win the election but is destined to resign in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office. I’m not talking about the 2016 election.

The year is 1968. The Vietnam war is dragging on, years from its conclusion. Civil rights and antiwar protests give rise to rioting and, at Kent State, the shooting deaths of college students by the Ohio National Guard.

On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, prompting riots in over 100 major US cities. On June 5, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.

The country is in turmoil.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago becomes a violent and unprecedented disaster. Thousands of antiwar protesters flock to Chicago where police, Army soldiers, National Guardsmen, and the Secret Service are waiting. The result is the infamous Chicago police riot. Quoting The Washington Post:

Onlookers and innocent bystanders — including reporters covering the scene and doctors attempting to offer medical help — were brutally beaten by the police.

The Republican presidential candidate has already run for president once and lost. This time he will win, only to resign because of a scandal and a second-rate burglary.

America seems to go through these upheavals periodically. It doesn’t mean the country is coming apart, though it may feel like it. Totalitarian regimes can hide their shortcomings behind a wall of censorship and state-controlled media. Democracies air their dirty linen in public.

America has been through many protest movements: civil rights, women’s suffrage, antiwar, gay rights, the labor movement, the black power movement, anti-globalization, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street, to name a few.

There were the GM sit-down strikes of 1936, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the brutally repressed Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965.

In 1981, the Solidarity Day march involved 260,000 people in Washington, DC. In 1982, a million people filled New York’s Central Park to protest nuclear weapons. In 1993, between 800,000 and a million people marched in DC for LGBT rights.

There was the Million Man March in DC in 1995 and the Million Woman March in Philadelphia in 1997. There were protests in American cities in 2003 when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq. There was the March for Women’s Lives in 2004. There is currently the Black Lives Matter movement and the take-a-knee NFL players’ protest. There are scattered protests and counter-protests over the removal of Civil War monuments from public spaces.

Demonstrations and peaceful protests are as American as apple pie. Every citizen is free to participate in a protest. If you have no desire to do that, that is okay, too. But do yourself a favor and try not to get too worked up when you see people you don’t even know protesting something. Support them or ignore them. Life is too short for anything else.