Anyone who was around during the tumultuous years of the late 60s has some sense of deja-vu with what is currently going on our country now.
Although not exactly the same circumstances, the division in actions among the people of America was almost identical to what it is now.
Times have changed, sure. In 1968, the year of this broadcast from talk-radio station KNEW in San Francisco over the protests and violence on the San Francisco State College campus over the Vietnam War and over the violent repercussions those demonstrations took by College President S.I. Hayakawa to quell dissent, is different from the ICE Raids and the divisions being sown by our own Federal Government – but not by much.
The fear in 1968 was the notion that America was rapidly turning into a Fascist state echoes those sentiments now – with a White House out of control and an Administration ill-equipped to handle a rapidly unpopular Presidency along with a dramatic uptick in violence in our Cities via raids on innocent citizens.
Methods of communication are different – we had no Internet at the time – no personal computers – no selfies – no Tik-Tok and no texting. We got our information via the news on radio, TV, newspapers and word of mouth – and even in 1968, the news media was quickly becoming untrustworthy, beholden to corporate entities and spin – we still had Walter Cronkite, who had the somewhat overwhelming label of being “the most trusted man in America”, so there was that. We also had news departments that had spines and journalists and a sense of responsibility, often at odds with the powers that shaped opinion.
We also relied on talk radio – that rather new entity in the world of communication that was an open forum for a lot of opinions and a lot of rhetoric.
This 2-hour sample of San Francisco talk and news station KNEW was a typical afternoon’s worth of talk from Robin King in 1968 was what people were listening to at the time; whether it was San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or New York. The climate of the country in 1968 was precarious at best – identical to what it’s like now.
But people were more active then – more prone to take things to the streets – more prone to take things into their own hands. We’ve become more passive in our outrage than we were in 1968. Though there are signs things are changing.
To get a better idea of what protesting was like and what an unsettling atmosphere felt like in 1968, here is KNEW-AM from Late November – Early December 1968.
It’s a rather wild ride.
