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A POSSIBLE REASON FOR COMMEMORATING HIGHWAY SIGNS - PART 3
by Ming Zhen Shakya
Many fathers, relieved of the need to support their children and prohibited by law from living with a mother who was on welfare, often became rogue males. Most of these men were unskilled workers. Between the lack of jobs and the inability to fulfill paternal responsibilities, they fell easily into crime.
The drug craze that started with marijuana and LSD intensified to more profitable heroin and cocaine. Drugs were easily obtained in Viet Nam and returning vets provided an additional market. In l945 there were 20,000 addicts in the United States, and most of these were "medical" addictions - either by persons addicted in the course of treatment or medical personnel who had easy access to narcotics. This number held steady until the Sixties. By l968 there were some 68, 000 heroin addicts in the U.S. By l973, there would be 600,000. Metropolitan crime rates climbed as addicts attempted to pay for the ever increasing cost of the illegal drugs.
Flower Children and assorted quasi-religious groups dropped out of standard family life to form communes in pursuit of Utopian dreams. Charlatans took advantage of the situation, giving rise to such anomalies as Jim Jones, Rajneesh, and Charles Manson.
And then, as we passed from bewilderment through neurosis, we entered l968's Psychotic Episode.
In l964 there had been a constructive effort to correct racial inequity through Civil Rights' legislation and /to provide, as remedy for previous prejudicial policies, preferential consideration to African-Americans through the Affirmative Action program/. But inept Black leadership allowed "The Rainbow Coalition" to include foreign minority groups who had never experienced any prejudice whatsoever. Black college applicants resented the sharing of advantages due them with Laotians, Koreans, Hondurans, and so on, who had never been enslaved in the U.S. Rainbow Coalition pressure insured that jobs and college placement advantages would be spread across the racial spectrum.
Resentment and frustration set the scene for inner-city mayhem. The first major riot occurred in Harlem in l964. Watts followed in 1965. Detroit in 1967. On it went... Newark, Rochester, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago. "Burn Baby Burn" shouted arsonists and spectators who often shot at firemen and police officers who were trying to extinguish the flames and prevent looting. The Kerner Commission documented l30 incidents of arson and looting in 1967 alone. The report regarding these riots was published in 1968.
Eldridge Cleaver, while in prison, wrote a series of impassioned essays on the need for black participation in the political process. Upon his release in 1966 he joined the Black Panther Party. A l968 shootout with police resulted in a young Black Panther's death and the wounding of several police officers. Cleaver's essays, collected into the incendiary / Soul on Ice/, were published in fateful l968.
And early in 1968, Czechoslovakia, the showcase for Communism's enlightened rule, experienced the Prague Spring of self-determination. It would not last through the fall. The Soviets, displeased with the flowering of Czech freedom, called a meeting of the Warsaw Pact and every country, except Romania, sent tanks to crush the plants before they had a chance to scatter any seeds. As if to illustrate the incomprehensible state of international relations, China castigated the Soviets for their "fascistic" methods.
In West Germany, the notorious Baader Meinhof Gang led pro-communist student riots, bombing a department store in Frankfurt.
Canada, struggling with French-Canadian demands for Independence, was still reeling from deGaulle's cry to the Quebecois Separatists, "Vive le Quebec libre!"
The USS Pueblo and its 83 man crew were captured by the North Koreans.
The Tet Offensive began in Vietnam with 70,000 well armed North Vietnamese soldiers taking the battle into the cities of South Vietnam. Our casualties mounted (543 killed and 2600 wounded in one week).
Robert Kennedy announced that he was a candidate for the presidency - and Lyndon Johnson announced that he was not.
In April, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated by racist James Earl Ray in Memphis. The news of his death caused riots in sixty cities. Forty people were killed.
In June, 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Palestinian Arab Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles.
5000 students rioted in Paris against deGaulle's "paternalistic" policies and in sympathy, workers all over France went on strike.
Thousands of pro-democracy students rioted in Poland; 80,000 students in London protested the Viet Nam war.
At the Democrat convention in Chicago the anti-war Yippies caused a riot which Chicago police violently quelled. Hubert Humphrey was nominated.
At the uneventful Miami Beach Republican Convention, Richard Nixon received the nomination.
India and Pakistan refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and threatened to resume the previous year's war.
In Czechoslovakia students staged protest marches and rallies against the communist regime.
Anti-War protests grew more violent as the announcement that Peace Talks would be scheduled - as soon as the parties could agree on the size and shape of the negotiating table. The diplomatic bickering would soon be more frustrating than the war.
From Japan came the horror of Minamata Disease - the neurological devastation caused by mercury poisoning. Industrial discharge of toxic mercury into the ocean near the town of Minamata worked its way up through the marine food chain. Hundreds of people died and thousands were deformed or enfeebled.
In Northern Ireland, the government's attempt to halt a Catholic protest march initiated "The Troubles" reviving ancient Irish/English conflicts. Thirty years of hunger strikes, terrorist killing, and riots would follow.
Ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis we had taken instances of foreign recklessness more seriously . But in 1964 a new genre, domestic recklessness, came to us in /Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb/ - which did anything but stop us from worrying. SAC's General Curtis LeMay was rumored to be the model for the kill-happy General Ripper. LeMay was still a shrewd, tough, and very happy warrior.
We entertained the possibility of lethal mistakes made by paranoid military officers who feared the loss of their "essence" or by mad scientists or fanatical B-52 pilots or bronco busting A-bomb riders shouting "Hee Haw" as they, and we, dropped into the nuclear void.
But if /Dr. Strangelove/ was played for laughs, /Fail Safe/ was not. Henry Fonda was oddly believable as a U.S. President who, preposterous as it now seems, solves the problem of our inadvertent destruction of Moscow by a quid pro quo nukeing of New York City. The sobering whine of a fried telephone was supposed to make us think seriously about the problems of accidental nuclear disasters. It succeeded.
In 1964 China had exploded its first A-Bomb; in 1966 its first Hydrogen Bomb; and in 1967 successfully launched intercontinental missiles capable of being armed with nuclear warheads. The average American began to worry about the control of nuclear weapons in communist countries - of which there were an ominously increasing number.
But in 1968 we sang with Bob Dylan and the Beatles and those of us who weren't singing saw an odd assortment of fantasy films. Aside from weekly TV episodes of /Star Trek/, we were captivated by /Rosemary's Baby/ (a resurgence of interest in Satan's lust and ambition) ; the low-budget but hugely successful /Night of The Living Dead/; civilization's self-destruction and reversion to pre-human=existence in /The Planet of The Apes/, a theme, along with the untrustworthiness of computers, Kubrick would also dramatize in /2001:A Space Odyssey/.
All over the world and for a variety of causes, students were rioting. Just before the Mexico City Olympics were set to begin, students protested governmental interference at the Polytechnic Institute. The police fired into the crowd killing an undetermined number of protesters and injuring hundreds in the ensuing rampage. The IOC, saying that since the riot did not involve Olympic activities, the games would go on.
And then Life Magazine featured /The Children of Biafra/ and we were appalled.
Because segregationist South Africa had been permitted to compete, dozens of African countries refused to send their athletes to the games.
Two American medal winners gave the Black Panther Salute during the playing of the Anthem. (They would later be stripped of their medals - a punishment which was clearly excessive, considering the long political contamination of the Olympics, as, for example, in the Berlin Games' 'Hitler Salutes'.)
But in 1968, Biafra dispelled the notion that America's racial problems were due solely to policies of White Supremacy and white-on-black violence and capitalist economic suppression of downtrodden African-Americans. Here was Black Nigeria starving to death one million prosperous black Ibo people from Biafra.
Not a week passed but we saw the emaciated bodies of children. We had seen pictures of starvation victims in camps such as Auschwitz; but those were all adults. The Germans had killed off the children long before the liberation's photographs. But nobody had ever seen such a graphic depiction of the deliberate starvation of hundred of thousands of children. Mothers, whose faces were all eyes and teeth, stared up at us while their children, with bloated bellies and matchstick limbs dropped helplessly onto the ground, too weak to brush away the flies that were already laying eggs in their mouths. A new word entered English from the language of Ghana: kwashiorkor - the bloated-belly form of starvation peculiar to children.
It made the well fed athletes standing on the podium giving a Black Power salute look a bit ridiculous.
If all this chaos were not enough, and it certainly should have been, beyond those nightly images of starving Biafrans, rose the specter of our biggest worry of all - the one we never wanted to talk about.
Curtis Le May accepted the Vice Presidential nomination to run with George Wallace on a 3rd Party ticket. Le May said that he thought a nuclear weapon was just another weapon in our arsenal and he would not hesitate to use it in the interests of efficiency. He didn't think the world would end if somebody used the weapon.
Forward to Part 4 
