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    tom hayden

    The Year That Changed Everything: A Personal Memory of 1968

    The Year That Changed Everything: A Personal Memory of 1968

    No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America

    John De Graaf
    Oct 04, 2018

    Fifty years have passed since the one that changed everything for my generation, the crucial turning point when the promise of the 1960s turned to a defeat and despair that still weighs on our thoughts of what might have been. It was a roller coaster year of emotional highs and lows, when unlikely dreams suddenly seemed possible, only to be dashed time and again. It marked the end of my political innocence, born in the magic of John Kennedy's Camelot. No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America.

    The year began with great hopes that the seemingly endless war in Vietnam might end soon. An anti-war Democrat, the cerebral Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, had challenged President Johnson in the upcoming presidential primary election. Soft-spoken and anything but radical, he impressed on us the necessity of cutting long hair and beards and putting on white shirts and ties to go "Clean for Gene" when we knocked on doors to get out the vote. Given little chance at first, his popularity was suddenly enhanced by developments across the Pacific.

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    Opinion
    Chicago '68: The 50-Year Lessons America Still Hasn't Learned

    Chicago '68: The 50-Year Lessons America Still Hasn't Learned

    The internecine war for the soul of American democracy continues in our own time, as the rage and fear tapped almost 50 years apart by Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have continued to mesmerize successive generations of Americans

    Peniel Joseph
    Aug 28, 2018

    Fifty years ago, anti-war protesters swarmed the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention to reject the Vietnam War, state violence, and injustice. In the process they turned the city into a veritable battleground over the fate of American democracy.

    "The whole world is watching!" protesters chanted in response to police violence in August 1968. That one phrase encapsulated much of the radical social justice insurgency of not only that year but also the entire decade of the 1960s. As the nation mourned the April assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and June killing of New York senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, thousands of radical activists came to Chicago to try and shame the Democratic Party into publicly adopting a peace plank that some hoped would lead to an end to war.

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    Opinion
    The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left

    The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left

    And who has all the power, in terms of violence? Our means of violence is very little. The government’s means, the right wing’s means, are very great. So, we’ve got to adopt nonviolence.

    Chris Hedges
    Apr 18, 2018

    The Weather Underground, a clandestine revolutionary organization that advocated violence, was seen by my father and other clergy members who were involved in Vietnam anti-war protests as one of the most self-destructive forces on the left. These members of the clergy, many of whom, including my father, were World War II veterans, had often became ministers because of their experiences in the war. They understood the poison of violence. One of the most prominent leaders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), to which my father belonged, was the Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, who as an Army second lieutenant fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

    The young radicals of the Vietnam era, including Mark Rudd--who in 1968 as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the occupation of five buildings at Columbia University and later helped form the Weather Underground--did not turn to those on the religious left whose personal experiences with violence might have saved SDS, the Weather Underground and the student anti-war movement from self-immolation. Blinded by hubris and infected with moral purity, the members of the Weather Underground saw themselves as the only real revolutionaries. And they embarked, as have those in today's black bloc and antifa, on a campaign that was counterproductive to the social justice goals they said they advocated.

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    Opinion

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