1968 - Mark Kurlansky [222]
Of course, one of the great lessons of 1968 was that when people try to change the world, other people who feel a vested interest in keeping the world the way it is will stop at nothing to silence them. In 1970 four antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University were shot and killed.
Yet all over the world people know that they are not powerless, that they can take to the streets the way people did in 1968. And political leaders, particularly those media-genius products of the 1960s, are very aware that popular movements are ignored at their peril. People under twenty-five do not have much influence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march. Remember 1968? In the mid-1990s, when students began protesting in Paris, the Mitterrand government paid attention in a way the de Gaulle government didn’t until whole universities were shut down. Mitterrand remembered 1968, and so did everyone in his government. On November 29–December 3, 1999, when a World Trade Organization conference in Seattle was confronted by huge, angry “antiglobalization” demonstrations, it made such an impression on then president Clinton, a zealous promoter of world trade, that he has regularly discussed the movement ever since.
The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbings and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who most offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and is missed. As Camus wrote in The Rebel, those who long for peaceful times are longing for “not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.” The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout about them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.
But by the end of the year 1968, many people felt weary, angry, and longing for a news story that was not abysmally negative. At the very end of the year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, provided that story. Only seven years earlier, when America seemed much younger; when political assassinations seemed to be something that happened in other, poorer, less stable countries; when the generation that was to fight, die, and protest over Vietnam were still schoolchildren—President Kennedy had promised that man would reach the moon by the end of the decade. On May 25, 1961, he had said:
I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—it will be an entire nation.
The new sixties generation thrilled