Mondays with Mike: When were those good old days?

I grew up in a household where politics—paying attention to them, thinking about them, and forming reasoned positions—was not sport, it was an obligation as a citizen. My sister volunteered—at the age of 16—for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and after enduring the heartbreak of seeing her candidate murdered, she ended up working for Sen. Eugene McCarthy (sort of the Bernie Sanders of his day, for you millennials out there).

My mother and sister fought like cats and dogs about, well, everything—for pretty much, well—their entire lives. Back then our mother was happy that her daughter cared, but mom had lived a lot longer—which made her wiser and more realistic from one point of view, or lacking ideals and too crusty to get it, from another.

(For the record, if I could have voted, it would have been Humphrey. I was already suspicious of politicians tilting at windmills. We all suspected my father may have voted for Nixon, but that he never said so for fear of his life. But in fairness he was also the kind of guy who would’ve held his vote close to his vest regardless.)

Which brings me to this: We’re in the midst of a crazy angry election season and crazy angry times. And we tend always to think our time is unprecedented in the degree of craziness and tumultuousness. But I’m here to say: It’s not so.

George C. Wallace–hard to tell how long his fingers were.

We didn’t have Donald Trump back in 1968. We did have George Wallace, though, and he did run in the presidential election, getting 14 percent of the vote on a platform that makes the Donald’s rants seem kind of tame. Think about that. And there was Strom Thurmond, a bald-faced racist who served for 48 years as Senator—largely because he was a bald-faced racist.

1968 was the birth of the hateful Southern Strategy that served the Republican Party well for decades (but now also goes a long way toward splainin’ how the party has painted itself into its current corner).

We have Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS and terrorism now. Back then it was the Cold War, near misses on nuclear war catastrophes, and a little strategy we called “containment,” which led to a little war that cost nearly 60,000 Americans their lives. Not to mention more than 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, and well over a million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers—not counting enormous civilian deaths owed to bombing. (I’m leaving out Laos and Cambodia.)

Oh, and RFK and King were killed, there were massive race riots, cities burning and campus shutdowns.

Cue The Temptations’ Ball of Confusion.

I’m not saying everything’s better. What I know without doubt is, our Ball of Confusion survived, and by my reckoning a lot really is better. The struggle continues. This too, shall pass,

And no matter how the election goes, I ain’t moving anywhere.