Intervention abroad leads to turmoil at home. College campuses are a hotbed of unrest and outrage, while protestors outside the White House call on the Democratic president, who is up for reelection, to change course. Losing support from his fracturing party, the president drops his reelection bid. A three-way campaign ensues, with the “law and order” candidate coming out on top as the country sinks further into chaos.
That’s not a prediction for 2024. But it is what happened in 1968, and the comparison between the two years is easy enough. History doesn’t repeat — it only rhymes. Yet looking toward the past can help us understand the present. So, if we know how 1968 ended, what does 2024 have in store for us?
The world was meant to become a better place in 1968. So much seemed so possible. But a year that began with hope — “World Bids Adieu To a Violent Year,” read The New York Times’ Jan. 1, 1968, issue — ended in despair.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Robert F. Kennedy, then running for president, was assassinated in June. Their relationship in life was complicated, to say the least, and they were vastly different. But King and Kennedy were united in death. Their murderers did not just kill men, nor even great Americans. They killed hope: a radical belief in the future of racial reconciliation, economic justice and a gentler, kinder country.
It’s impossible to listen to King’s final “Mountaintop” speech, delivered the day before he was killed, without tearing up at its prophetic quality. And from Capetown to Kansas, Kennedy’s weighty words always rouse me to action. But I know of no preacher, no politician, no person alive today who shares King’s or Kennedy’s rhetorical prowess, their wells of empathy or their abiding belief in a shared humanity.
“What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet,” Kennedy said the day after King’s assassination. That cause — a blazing torch of promise — has already passed to us. We cannot let it go out this year.
Cue that old cliché about this being “the most important election in our lifetime.” I’ll not ask you to vote or to volunteer — what young person, and all of us were young once, hasn’t been told that their generation will fix everything? I’ll only ask you to believe that a better world is possible.
Americans have rehashed the issues of 1968 for the past 55 years: What responsibility do we have to our allies? How should we welcome our newest citizens? What is our country’s role in the world? How can we keep our children fed, our lights on and our waterways clean? Can we bind up our wounds and tend to the awful scars of racial hatred, or will we surrender to ignorance?
The past year was a bleak time to be a human being, to have a heart and soul. But we have been here before, as Kennedy told a crowd of supporters in Indianapolis the night King was assassinated. “We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future,” he said.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as an “easy” time, but there are times when we will succeed, when the impossible will become achievable and when we will “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” That time can be now.
Ethan Benn, a senior majoring in journalism and mass communication, is the opinions editor.
