By David Rose
This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of events that happened in 1968. I can do without it. 1968 was a bitch. The moon is in the seventh house several hours every day and Jupiter aligns with Mars once or twice a year. Despite the rosy optimism of the song, the Age of Aquarius started off bad and went downhill from there.
January brought the Tet Offensive. We had been told for years we were winning the Viet Nam War. We were told as much after Tet as well, but nobody believed it.
April saw the assassination of Martin Luther King. The freedom marches would continue but absent was the grace and dignity he brought to the endeavor.
I took Bobby Kennedy’s June assassination pretty hard. I’d seen in him a possible end to the war and a bridging of the generation gap.
I’m not sure how the later would have worked. Perhaps I would have played my father some Stones, maybe Sympathy for the Devil.
He would have played me some Julius La Rosa…. Well, it could be that one was a bridge too far.
In August’s Democratic Convention, Mayor Richard Daley sent more than 20,000 uniformed thugs into the streets of Chicago to deal with 10,000 peaceful demonstrators. Overkill would be the opposition’s weapon of choice.
In November we witnessed the resurrection of Richard Nixon. What good can you say about a man when even his friends don’t like him?
In December I was selected by the members of my community to serve in the armed forces of the United States. For those not up on the lingo of the era, I was drafted.
2018 also marks the 200 th adversary of Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein”. Let’s celebrate that one instead. Rock on Frankie.
In a blast from the past, David Rose, author of plenty of satire, and former guest writer to The Springs Magazine, offers his take on the world.
