The Day the '60s Died

Fell down an Internet wormhole tonight - as one does - and wound up watching this entire hour-long PBS documentary on YouTube. Learned a lot. Was shocked and scared by how relevant and pertinent the events of Spring 1970 seem today, with the nation as divided as I've ever seen it and a legitimate animosity between the two factions. It's not the shootings or the Vietnam War protests that got to me - that's just 20th century American history at this point. Rather, it was the public reaction to the shootings. Polls showed a majority of Americans in 1970 thought that the students were more responsible for their own deaths than the National Guardsmen who fired upon them. "Should have killed them all," said plenty. This, even though a majority of Americans also didn't think we should have gone to Vietnam in the first place. Imagine that culture! Imagine a world where a significant group of people could oppose something, but then also find it justifiable to kill other people voicing such dissent. You think we're slipping into fascism now? Jesus Christ. To recap - in 1970, the American people were far more annoyed by the anti-war movement than they were by the war, even though a majority of them opposed the war. Wow!

Zooming out a bit - and this documentary kind of hints at this and sets it up without overtly focusing on it - Nixon and the Republican Party came out of this thing smelling like roses. Two years later, Nixon won reelection with over 500 electoral votes, and the GOP was able to finally capture blue collar white Americans from the Democrats - sound familiar? - a key demo they'd retain for decades, because blue collar white workers were fed up with rich college kids protesting, rioting, and sowing discord in America. (Okay, this is starting to feel too currently relevant and foreboding again. Time to stop.)

Here's the whole thing, right here. Check it out: