America is not more broken now than it’s ever been. There has always been hunger and homelessness, corruption and crime, pollution and prejudice, and gross disparity in access to both basic human rights and the more lofty pursuit of happiness.
The big difference today is communications: we hear about almost everything, almost everywhere, almost immediately. Inescapably. Repeatedly.
Sometimes that’s good, because this constant drumbeat might motivate us to address problems. But at other times we get so swamped by the tsunami of bad news and so suspicious of mis-information that we become paralyzed and drown in despair. If things seemed more innocent years ago, it’s only because we didn’t know what was going on then.
Examining a few years ago some photographs of our honeymoon in Europe in 1972, I said: “How innocent those times were.” But truthfully, those times were terrible.
The Vietnam War was raging and ripping apart an America where, two years earlier, college campuses had been in chaos following the US invasion of eastern Cambodia and the killing of four and injuring of nine protesting Kent State University students by Ohio National Guard troops. . . two years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. . .amidst two years of “race riots” in American cities. If ever there was a time when America lost its innocence, it had to have been then.
If ever there was a time that puts our county’s current mess in perspective, it was 1967 to 1972.
The “innocence” of the 1972 photographs was not in the times, but in our selves. We were innocent of the future. We had no idea what was in store for us as individuals, as a couple or as a country.
We had no idea when we were traveling 48 years ago that America’s world-wide reputation in which we basked then would be so battered now. We had no idea that the what was known as a nation of immigrants then would be closed to the world’s refugees today.
Worst of all, we had no idea then that many streets of many American cities would still be scenes of frightening demonstrations over the treatment of our country’s citizens of color. . .our most obvious evidence that the more things have changed in America, the more they have stayed the same. . .proof that we were not innocent then, or now.
JER
ALL OVER THE MAP 