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zonemaster

(230 posts)
Mon Jun 8, 2020, 09:47 AM Jun 2020

It's 1968 again!

Looking at the parallels of unrest in the US in the late 60s vs. today...

With the Viet Nam War, there you had a bunch of rich, paranoid (communism, in this case, vs. brown people), white 'patriotic' politicians and citizens wanting other people's kids (predominantly poor and disproportionately black) to readily sign up to die to keep the America that they knew 'great' by defeating the communist menace on the other side of the globe. Not much value placed on the fodder they wanted to send to Viet Nam to help beat back the 'hordes' that scared them.

Now we have the wealthy 1-percenters, GOP grifters, business magnates and low-information Fox News propaganda consumers telling other people that they need to support 'Merika and get back to work in the salons, the meat-packing plants, the grocery stores and the gyms, where the lowly 'drones' should risk their lives to ensure that the privileged, patriotic real Americans mightn't be inconvenienced. And the extra COVID load that'll ultimately put on the health-care workers? That's their problem - they chose that profession. Here, too, little value is placed on other people's lives and livelihoods. The patriots want what they want, and if someone else needs to die for them to get it, well - that's the cost of 'freedom'.

(One notable difference between 50 years ago and today is that, the GOP has really subsumed and crystallized people of that mindset almost exclusively into their party.)

With abject disrespect for others as a foundation, combined with strong, socially-unsettling forces and events - like the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, the draft for Viet Nam service in the 60s, or today with mass unemployment, the specter of COVID-19, the GOP's increasingly-overt fascism & racism, live police snuff films, and emergence of all manner of 'Karen and Biff' assholery - these are the matches to the fuse of the younger people rising up and resisting, saying, "We're not interested in buying, with our futures and our lives, the shitty social status quo you're trying to preserve."

That's why these protests are, I think, more than only a reaction to George Floyd's murder, and could really result in positive change to to number of issues that have been getting progressively worse over the decades. I feel we're reaching a threshold - a critical mass - for effecting long-needed changes, and I think that the GOP's politicians, adherents and policies are going to be the ones to endure a greater degree of 'adjustment'.

Oh, yeah - please read this post, which is relevant and spurred me to finally write this observation:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213562371

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UncleNoel

(864 posts)
3. In 1968 I was campaign manager for a Black candidate for Congress in Montgomery, Al
Mon Jun 8, 2020, 10:33 AM
Jun 2020

I protested in the streets with Abernathy and others, I did over 100 attachments for an Alabama redistricting case working personally with Morris Dees, I did precinct organization with E. D. Nixon and Mrs.Carr, and I spent the last week in the state with Clifford and Virginia Durr. Yes, there are many similarities as we were battling in the front yard of the Wallace movement. I finally had to leave the state as Virginia told me, "Bill, you are a Yankee. This is our fight down here." But she was just sugar coating it as it is a fight for all of us everywhere. I ldft a broken man to restore me life as best I could, but I left knowing I had done what needed to be done as best I could. Recovered and working on my Ph.D. in anthropology at Indiana University I returned later to help the NDPA challenge party at the Miami Convention, even writing a speech for Julian Bond that he gave in defence of our challenge.

We face the same challenges today and I am with Biden all the way.

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