Four years worse than 2020: 1968
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Today will be the final post in this short series on years worse than 2020. I began Monday with a year of starvation for millions, 1315. Tuesday we looked at one of the worst pandemics in history and its effects on western Europe and the broader world in 1348. Wednesday we took a step back to survey six other years that I could have included—giving us not just four, but ten years demonstrably worse than 2020 in this project. And yesterday we took a deep, grim dive in what is, for my money, the most miserable year in human history, 1945.
Today, we’ll conclude with one more year that is still easily within living memory, a year of political upheaval, campus radicalism, racial violence, dramatic social change, and even worldwide disease:
1968
This was only fifty-two years ago, and if its events feel familiar, if it resembles the world we recognize it is not only thanks to proximity, but because in many ways its upheavals have in their turn given birth to conflicts we struggle over and fuss about online today.
As this is the year closest to our own, and recognizing that anything following even a summary of 1945 like the one yesterday might appear small potatoes by comparison—as well as in the interest of space—I’ve chosen to adopt the same stripped down organizing principle as that used for 1933 in Wednesday’s interlude post.
In southeast Asia
The year began with the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, each of which lasted months and resulted in thousands of killed and wounded, including civilians purged by the Viet Cong when they took South Vietnamese cities. The latter, which came as a shock to an American public given continuous mathematical assurance of impending victory, severely damaged LBJ and his government’s credibility and further stoked the American anti-war movement. Multiple war crimes occurred on both sides including the My Lai massacre, in which US troops killed over 300 civilians. LBJ declared an end to the ongoing American bombing of North Vietnam and, shortly thereafter, shifted the bombing campaign to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, including its routes through Laos. In Cambodia, local Communists affiliated with North Vietnam, the VC, and the Chinese Communist Party founded the Khmer Rouge.
In Europe
In the spring, leftist student protests occurred in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though the largest, most radical, and most destructive were those in Paris and other French cities, a series of events too complicated even to begin to summarize. (Here’s a game attempt from NPR. Here’s a negative reaction from a well known eyewitness to the events.) Two stores in Frankfurt were firebombed by leftwing German terrorist Andreas Baader, who would go on to found the terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction). Palestinian terrorists hijacked an El Al flight in Rome and diverted it to Algiers, where they held its passengers hostage for forty days.
In the United States
LBJ chose not to seek reelection following the Tet Offensive and poor showings against challengers in the Democratic primaries. A massive outbreak of tornadoes stretching from Arkansas to Iowa and including two F5 tornadoes killed seventy-two people, injured 1200, and destroyed over a thousand homes. A student protest at a segregated bowling alley in South Carolina ended with police firing on the crowd, killing three and wounding almost thirty. Students protesting the Vietnam War and a list of other grievances, inspired by the example of Parisian students, occupied buildings at Columbia University; the administration caved to their demands. A Palestinian terrorist and a white supremacist assassinated Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, respectively. The latter’s murder, in combination with the events in South Carolina and other violent incidents across the last three summers, triggered race riots in over a hundred cities. The National Guard, US Army, and Marine Corps were called in to reestablish order in some cities, especially Washington, DC. On a lower level, black nationalists engaged in a series of shootouts with police in several major cities including Cleveland and Oakland, and leftist groups fought with police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, leading to the injury of over 700 people. Hijackers seized control of a Pan Am flight from New York and redirected it to Cuba, the beginning of a five-year period in which 130 American airliners will be hijacked. The November election was not close; Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey by a margin of 110 electoral votes. Third party segregationist candidate George Wallace carried five states. In December, the Zodiac killer murdered his first two victims.
Worldwide
The Hong Kong flu pandemic (aka “Mao flu”), a highly contagious virus originating in Asia and brought to the US by troops returning from Vietnam, killed between one and four million people. Over half of America’s 100,000 victims were under 65.
Conclusions
I began this series with a line from CS Lewis that I’ve returned to again and again: “Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.” Indeed. And this in the face of the terrifying new technology of the atomic bomb.
This series emerged from that historical understanding—that our problems are by no means unique, nor as severe as we want to believe. But this is not to say that our problems are not problems. Far from it. Let me reiterate what I said in the first post: 2020 has been a bad year for a lot of people. But what should we expect? Though offering many, many different solutions and means of coping, the greatest sages are all in general agreement with one of Jesus’s most overlooked and “unclaimed” promises: “In this world you will have trouble.”
I went into this project last week with a grab bag of ideas about how I would conclude it. I don’t set much stock by my own advice (and you shouldn’t either), but if I were to give any it’d be some of the things I’ve been shouting all this year:
Use social media as little as possible, and ditch Twitter entirely.
Read a book—preferably by someone who’s been dead a while.
Keep your nose to the grindstone.
Go outside.
I’ll stand by those. But I’d rather wrap up this grim trek through a widely scattered decade of suffering and death with something more heartening. I settled on three things I think may help to—like the historical perspective I’ve tried to offer in these posts—vaccinate us against despair.
Be tough.
Look back at that verse from the Gospel of John above. That’s a guarantee from the mouth of Christ himself. A healthy adult must learn a certain tough-mindedness. How much of our own childhoods was spent learning this? And yet we lionize and enable whining, the louder the more prominent—a culture of spoiled children clamoring to be heard over each other. Remember that no hero, of whatever variety, ever achieved that status through softness, and certainly not through whining about whatever a given year had brought their way. As Richard Weaver put it:
Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.
Toughness can be learned. I think it needs to be relearned on a broad cultural basis. That means embracing difficulty and not complaining—lost arts, arts I consistently fail at, but worth our while.
Be thankful.
For years now I’ve intended to write an essay called “Gratitude: The Historical Virtue.” I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond the title, which pretty much conveys the message. I value historical perspective not just as a salve for anxiety about the present but for its necessity to gratitude. Without memory we cannot be thankful, and when a culture becomes as present-minded as our own we are bound to become entitled and ill-tempered, having forgotten where our comforts came from and having no perspective with which to view our hardships.
Where to start? Purposefully develop a sense of history, of a past. Start with your own and it will immediately take you outside yourself—to those two people who, whatever their flaws, are directly responsible for your existence. See this as an unmixed gift among whatever list of complaints our culture wants us to populate. As Chesterton wrote:
In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about. In being grateful for my birth, I am grateful for something which has already happened; which happened, sad as it may seem to some, quite a long time ago.
Note the simple historical thinking, and note the gratitude. Begin there and, having begun, don’t stop.
Have faith.
We are an idolatrous people. I’m a big believer in man as Homo religiosus; as Karen Armstrong once put it, “As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.” So in one sense, to urge ourselves to have faith is redundant, as people will have faith in something—it’s our nature.
But let us not put faith in the weak, fragile, jealous gods that have demanded our loyalty and our blood—or the blood of others—this year, whether they be freedom, a strong economy, and pet theories about the real goings on behind the curtain on one side; safety, equality, and activism on the other; or, for both sides, power, autonomy, scientific certitude and control over the world, a wide selection of terrible political figures, and utterly owning the opposition. That’s not even getting into the broader therapeutic deities of the Universe or, worse, humanity. These gods are immanent; they exist in the here and now and rise and fall with it, which is why they are so jealous and so demanding, especially as they pretend to more and more transcendence.
It’s real transcendence that we need, which means we have a search ahead of us—more hard work. So if we have faith in something outside the tyrannical present, let us search it out with fear and trembling rather than confidence in our own righteousness.
Not only will looking outside ourselves to something beyond this world anchor and steady us in times of strife, for Christians like myself it can include a redemptive side effect, something notably lacking in 2020. To quote more fully from John’s account: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
Be tough. Be thankful. Have faith. And most of all, be of good cheer—a real counterculture, the revolution we all really need.
Besides, 2020 ain’t over yet.
