Are Things Really the Worst Ever?

In an editorial yesterday about the events in Los Angeles and elsewhere entitled “MAGA morphs into Make America Cruel Again,” the Chicago Tribune “wondered how on God’s green earth this country can hold it together for three-and-a-half more years of this level of presidential overreach, this amount of hatred and division.”  My response is simple: Does the Tribune remember the 1960s?  Consider just 1968.  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April.  The ensuing riots all over the country make what is happening in LA look minor.  You can still see the effects of those riots in parts of Chicago today. 

Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  Then came the Democratic convention in Chicago.  I assume the Tribune remembers that.

That was just in the United States.  In January, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and held its crew captive for eleven months.  At the end of January, Communist forces in Vietnam launched their Tet Offensive.  While the offensive was a strategic defeat for the Communists, its main casualty was President Lyndon Johnson.  There were student protests and riots all over Europe.  In August, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia because it dared to have thoughts of its own. 

And then there was the draft.

In other words, while things seem crazy now, we have been through worse.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about what is happening – and how upset everybody is getting, but we should keep things in perspective.  Because we have been there before.
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UPDATE (6/12/25 9:00 am): A version of this post appeared in the Chicago Tribune "Voice of the People" today under the title "We have seen worse".  You can find it here (it is the sixth letter).