I Was a Child During the Chicago Convention

If it got unstuck, when did it do so for you? Did the madness influence your affiliation with the antiwar movement? Do you remember '68, with the Tet offensive, the assinations of RFK and MLK, the Chicago convention and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? What did you think of when you watched those events unfold on the news? Do you think the madness started earlier, perhaps with the civil rights marches? With the JFK assassination?

My guess, based largely on secondhand information, is that things started to change around 1968 (that's when things burst into the consciousness of this kid, anyway).
A number of different things happened then. The assassinations and the events in Chicago showed that changing things would be _much_ harder than some people thought, and that those in power were prepared to use rather extreme means to keep things from changing. In addition, seeing the events in Chicago on the evening news made it much more difficult for "middle america" to ignore what was going on. And the war was beginning to move in a direction which began to make clear to anyone who looked that the pronouncements from the Pentagon were a pack of lies. Finally, Czechoslovakia contributed to a sense of disillusionment and anomie on the part of those on the left who had looked toward Communism as an ideal (something far more marked in the U.S. than in Europe, as the U.S. had no real indigenous established left parties).

I wonder -- although you were only seven years old in 1968, did you have any personal observations from Convention week that you think would be worth sharing? Alarm at all the noise on the street? A changed perception of policemen as "bad men," perhaps?

Certainly, at least to some degree. As I mentioned in my past letter, one of the thing that Chicago illustrated was the length to which the establishment was willing to go. Previous instances of police excess (such as events during civil rights marches) could have been written off as the actions of a minority; Chicago (and the Mayor's support) was much more plain.
But as far as personal observations, I'm not sure that I have anything important to add. My memories of that time have been overlain with so much else that it is no longer clear what are my own memories of the time and what are later additions. I do recall one "objective" measure of the impact it had on me, however: as a grade school history project (this would have been in '69 or '70) I did a report on the the British military in Northern Ireland. I doubt that I would have shown the same interest had I not seen examples of police action in my own life.

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