The Loud Echoes of 20th Century History

I can’t recall where I saw it—Facebook or Twitter, probably—but someone else observed that 2020 is becoming the unholy combination of 1918 and 1968.

The pandemic isn’t history, yet. We’re waiting to see if a second wave will crash over us, and it seems kind of likely, unfortunately. In 1918, it wasn’t the first wave of the flu that killed more people than World War I did—it was wave number two, and I sure hope that sad history does not repeat with this latest virus—which, by the way, we should all know by now, is not the flu.

From Wikimedia Commons, 1918 image of U.S. Army camp in Kansas.

As states open up, friends, please be as safe as you can be. If you’re going to be close to other humans, stay as distant as you can and wear your mask. Don’t touch your face. Wash your hands. Sure, your mask does not protect you all that well, but if we all cover our faces in tight places, we’ll protect each other.

And my nightly binge of news watching this week has been full of people in the streets. Something is happening here, what is not yet exactly clear, but as this country has lost two Vietnam War’s worth of lives, suddenly the specter of America’s original sin—our troubled history of systemic racism—explodes once again

1968, April, soldier guards site of riot after King assassination. Library of Congress image from Wikimedia Commons.

As America’s cities burns, our incompetent, tone-deaf, man child president pours gasoline on the fire. He wants to be tough and revels in “tough” gestures. He can’t console, bring together, calm down, empathize—anything that this country needs right now.

June began with the heavy-handed clearing of protesters so an old white man could strut across the street with his all-white posse and awkwardly hold a book he’s never read—The Bible—in front of a church where the church officials were caught by surprise.

I don’t want to judge another man’s heart—but the whole event felt icky and weird. It’s wrong for an American politician to be waving the Bible that way in a clumsy media faux event. Seeing the images and video of this president standing before the church ought to be the media content that, like Michael Dukakis in a panzer, finally settles this election contest and causes us to rise up and wash Trump and his party away in a righteous flood.

I can only hope. Unfortunately, Trump playing the law-and-order card might not fail. And he’s pouring the gasoline partly because the riots in the streets at least help us forget the other story—Trump’s massively incompetent handling of the pandemic.

Anyway, 1918 and 1968, all at once. With 1929 tossed in there for extra seasoning. Is America great again, or what?

What is new is how swiftly events move and change and become movements via social media. Cell phones captured the tragic end of George Floyd’s life, and suddenly there is a wave of protest.

And reporters are also under attack. Many of the police have been in the Trump camp, and dangerous rhetoric about enemies of the people is coming to fruition, even as the president is ready to militarize the response.

Democracy hangs in the balance this year in the cradle of modern democracy. Social media and politics are colliding in a unique year that will define us for generations. 2020. It’s bigger than 1918, 1968 or 1929, and this year will reveal who we really are.