1968: What happened wasn't exactly clear

By Skip Miller

Money was not for food in those days. Money was for books and music albums. He who had read The Journals of Albion Moonlight was wealthy and accorded a prominent seat in literary discussions. He who had food shared with the others.

We didn’t know what we were trying to figure out. We just knew we were working very hard at it.

It was 1968. Some of us were soldiers. Some were protesters. Others were students, roamers, dreamers, poets and freaks. All of us were young … we were so very young …

I was a folksinger. I wrote flinty poetry about social and moral changes. I lived in a battered apartment with another musician and a college student who always had a paper to write.

Life was a non-stop, usually ill-advised adventure.

I hitched to New York’s Greenwich Village, determined to introduce myself to a poet named W.H. Auden. After standing outside of his brownstone for most of a frigid day I realized you didn’t know what W.H. Auden looked like.

I went to a backwoods cabin to meditate, got snowed in, and didn’t eat for four days. When I told my girlfriend what happened she laughed until tears dripped from her chin.

And all of us endured the news of the day, which ranged from horrific to absurd.

Combat reports from Vietnam, race riots, protest marches, and assassinations dominated those reports.

The year opened with the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album going to No. 1 on the charts. It opened with Vince Lombardi coaching his last game for the Green Bay Packers – a victory over the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II. We giggled our way through the premier of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Then all hell broke loose.

On Jan. 30 the North Vietnamese attacked 100 cities in South Vietnam in what is now known as the Tet Offensive.

At South Carolina State the National Guard killed three black students and wounded 50. The students were protesting against a bowling alley that would not serve black people.

President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis.

Presidential candidate and senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot on June 5. He died the next day.

That August the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago amid riots, protests, and beatings. The day after Hubert H. Humphrey emerged as the Democrats presidential candidate the Beatles released Hey Jude.

Days before the start of the Olympics in Mexico City, Mexican soldiers opened fire on protesting students, killing some 300.

Richard Nixon was elected 37^th president of the United States. O.J. Simpson won the Heisman Trophy. The Beatles released their White Album and the stock market fell into an 18-month nose dive.

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

It was 1968 and America lost what was left of its innocence. People looked at each other with growing mistrust, if they looked at each other at all. We lost an almost child-like faith in our government always doing the right thing. We had questions.

Although the hallmarks of triumph were many – the first adult heart transplant was one – events numbed us, angered us, numbed us some more.

That Christmas, in honor of my backwoods cabin adventure, my girlfriend gave me The Boy Scouts Manual. I also received a book entitled M*A*S*H, written by Richard Hooker.

Friends gathered at the battered, tattered apartment. In the quiet glow of Christmas Night lights we professed hope that 1969 would be a better, kinder year.

We were skeptical. That didn’t stop us from hoping.

Forty years have passed.

We are fighting a war that is losing context. The economy is sliding toward the abyss we call recession. We are in the early stages of a presidential election – too many believe that election will solve our national ills. We have more than a few questions about our government’s conduct.

Beneath it all, hard and glowing, is the crystal of our hope. As long as we have that we have the security of tomorrow.