No Good Time

Last night, I watched the first two episodes of the ‘1968’ documentary on CNN. It’s amazing how hard a story can hit when when you already know how it ends. 

The world was in turmoil. There were riots in the streets. Protests were met with savage attacks by law enforcement. War raged in Southeast Asia. America’s cites burned.

Two calming voices emerged from the chaos. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was steadfast in his belief that non-violent protests could prevail over ignorance, racial injustice, and police brutality. Senator Robert Kennedy represented a new, hopeful vision for leadership. The war would come to an end soon. We believe that. And the poor and the oppressed in this country would finally get a fair shake and a voice in the halls of power.

In the space of two months and two days, from 4/4 to 6/6, both of them were killed.

There’s no good time to be assassinated. There’s no good reason. But what happened to these to men, men of peace, men of quality, men of progressive ideas, what happened to them defies reason and makes us question the very fabrics of human civilization. Millions were being slaughtered on both sides in a war that even the American generals did not understand. Domestic civil unrest was more serious and widespread than at any time in the last hundred years. And the two men who were most likely to lead us out of this mess were shot dead.

Why? Why the fucking hell why? God damn it! Does life have to be this unfair? Does it really have to be this harsh? This callous? This ridiculously unfathomable? 

The eventual election of Richard Nixon later did nothing to improve the situation. Nixon’s mantra was to “get tough”, something that sounds appealing in movies but proved to be extraordinarily foolish and ineffective in the real world. The war raged on for seven more bloody years and expanded into the neighboring counties of Laos and Cambodia. - Spoiler Alert: It was not a success story. - Social unrest continued. Distrust in established institutions grew increasingly serious under Nixon, who was eventually forced to resign due his infamous abuse of power.

How different might things have been had RFK been elected president in 1968? How different would things be today if the last election had swung differently? It makes me wonder whether we as a nation have learned anything in the past fifty years.

Copyright © 2018 Daniel R. South 

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