Counterpoint: Blame it on '68? The reality is more complex

Stephen B. Young's recounting of current resonances from America's chaotic 1968 is a useful reminder of that continuing fissure in the narrative and idea of America ("Blame it on '68," Jan. 7).

But where Young clearly comes down on the side of the pre-1968 status quo, I offer some alternate facts, as one who grew up in the same era but emerged with several different lessons.

Like Young, I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s in the brave and benevolent shadow of the Greatest Generation and its heroic achievements, not only in World War II but in the "forgotten" war on the Korean Peninsula. I studied and absorbed that full curriculum of American exceptionalism with pride.

But around 1968, I was shocked to discover chapters that narrative had left out. I learned from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others of the enforced, deplorable condition of African-Americans — slavery by another name — including real threats in the South of violence for stepping out of line, and a robust denial of education and voting rights, fundamental American ideals.

And not only the South. We learned the entire nation was riddled with breathtaking de jure and de facto policies based on race and religion. Our own lovely neighborhoods quietly enforced covenants against selling to Jews, Asians and blacks, and that was the least of it. The FHA, which ushered in America's greatest economic boon, widespread homeownership, was "redlined" — fundamentally restricted to white neighborhoods.

We learned too, around 1968, of the shocking repression of our native nations, the way Russia and China today repress their Chechnyan and Tibetan minorities. We learned of countless thousands of hideous, sometimes-fatal "coat-hanger" abortions, into which American women felt forced by law, which would culminate in the Supreme Court's decision in 1973 that women have the right to choose that biological destiny.

And we learned around 1968 that the universal military draft, a legacy of World War II conscription but no longer a military necessity, operated instead as government social engineering, applying "the club of induction" to steer the male population into preferred careers.

Young cites the "Port Huron Statement" of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), indeed influential though hardly widely read. What the nation did read, or listen to, were the speeches of King, eloquently attempting to "bend the arc of history toward justice," not only against unjust racial policies but, just prior to his assassination, a moral questioning of the war in Vietnam and poverty at home.

Many of these truths came tumbling forth in and around the infamous summer of 1968 that Young invokes. But it was lived differently by those like Young who were serving valiantly overseas fighting the threat of communism in Vietnam. At home, we lived an internal challenge to America, the greatest since the Civil War, to live up to its ideals.

The great bleeding wound of 1968 was indeed Vietnam, where Young served with passion and distinction and effectiveness. I grew up with his same patriotic ideals, and during the era of the mandatory male military draft, in 1966, I accepted a position in Navy Officer Candidate School, but was denied admission by a 4-F rating — "medically unfit" due to childhood asthma acquired in one of the nation's most heavily polluted environs, near the 30 coal-fired paper mills in and around Green Bay, Wis.

Both parties' internal divisions, pivotal in 1968 and now, are nowhere more stark than in the way they deal today with the formerly bipartisan legacy and ongoing threats of pollution.

World War II left America, like China today, the undisputed king of global heavy manufacturing, based on dirty fossil fuels, a redoubt of unprecedented prosperity and epic pollution. The revolt against pollution reached national expression at the first Earth Day in 1970, but a major seed had been planted in 1968 with the publication, not of the Port Huron Statement, but of the first Whole Earth Catalog. The cover featured a NASA photograph of planet Earth floating in the vast blackness of space. That image, the first widely seen, was a shock and inspiration to all who saw the fragility of our home planet.

It is instructive that Young's casual demographic analysis is limited to "take out New York and LA and Trump won a majority vote." Take out Minneapolis and Trump wins Minnesota, too. But what's the point?

The nation indeed has a political rural-urban divide. But to dismiss the political sentiments of the nation's cities, not to mention the deeply rural tilt of the Electoral College, is revealing.

The rural-urban divide is real — the countryside red, the cities blue. But it is worth noting that, with automation and consolidation, highly productive rural America is growing empty of opportunity, the children and grandchildren moving to cities to invent new microprocessors and start internet businesses. And as gay rights have come to the fore, the gay sons and daughters of rural America escaped to cities that are more open and affirming, a sad legacy splitting many families to the core.

Young attributes Nixon's victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to "shrewdly appealing" to the Silent Majority. In fact, in an election symmetrically as close as 2016, Nixon also "won" by flirting with treason, illegally interfering in the Paris peace talks that could have tilted voters toward Humphrey.

Prior to last year's election, Young wrote a memo to his Caux Roundtable membership, which includes me, stating why he could not vote for either candidate. Trump, because he was ... Trump. Young's case against Hillary Clinton began with a speech she made as a college senior at Wellesley in 1968. Invited by her class to speak, she eloquently questioned the war, making national news. Clearly, Young and many others risking their lives overseas felt deeply betrayed.

Yet all Americans should be able to agree, in principle, that civil, voting and marriage rights for all people, including all races and women and the differently gendered population, is the direct result of our founding fathers' advocacy of liberty for all. And we all should agree that American capitalism, regulated to cover significant external costs, is the engine of current and future prosperity.

History has a way of undermining all narratives. In our indeed politically and socially fractured time — hardly unique in our history, recall only the Civil War — there is a consensus on one fact: Vietnam, our mortal enemy in 1968, is now our friend. A place where the horrors, blunders and bloodshed both sides now reveal can be healed. Where Americans are welcome to visit, are greeted with smiles and smile back.