This is not necessarily a good thing. When I was 9 it was 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy occurred. Unrest was percolating in the air with no end in sight.
Half a world away, in Malaysia where I was a mere schoolboy… I too felt this rising tension. It finally broke into race riots the following year soon after elections. It was a very dark period all around.
The phrase, “Has the world gone mad?” kept cropping up in conversations. Little did we realize that it would get worse before it got better.
Sad to say but that is what it feels like now. With the levels of polarization edging further up… how can it not? Reasonable disagreements are almost non-existent… replaced by fanatical absolutism.
I was watching a documentary a few nights ago that suggested that this era of mistrust really began with President Kennedy’s assassination… or at least with the botched handling of Oswald’s arrest and murder while still in custody.
Not that conspiracy theories did not exist before then, but the few spread to the many… and has kept growing ever since.
It doesn’t thrill me that the period that makes up my entire life has been an era of growing mistrust.
Look, I’m no Pollyanna who believes that world peace can be achieved… ever. But as a student of history I know the world has either lived through times of strife and times of relative calm… and that this is cyclical.
It might be advisable for us to throw in our energies and work toward the latter, eh?