Nation will overcome partisan divide
United we stand, divided we fall. It is a handy political phrase that goes back to the ancient Greeks and makes its way through Revolutionary War patriot Patrick Henry, Civil War-era President Abraham Lincoln and onto Pink Floyd’s “Hey You.”
Well, as a country we are not now very united, but we are not falling either, despite what you might hear or see on slanted network or cable television newscasts or in The New York Times. These once-respected news outlets would have you believe that the United States is in decline as a democracy following the mailed bomb threats against celebrity Democrats and CNN, as well as the horrific murders of the 11 worshipers at the Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh. “We are shattered as a nation,” one talking head said.
They should have been around during the Vietnam War. But they weren’t; they either hadn’t been born yet or were too young to comprehend. Meanwhile, they blame President Trump and his mangled, nationalist rhetoric for these disturbing developments and the alleged “decline” of the United States.
It may not be morning in America, but the sky is not falling on the United States, despite what the unlearned media is telling you. It is true that the country is going through a rough patch, given the sharp political divide, as Trump attempts to turn the country away from the threatening socialism of the Democrat Party. And maybe it will get rougher.
But the division in the country pales in significance compared to what the country went through in the ’60s when the U.S., under President Lyndon B. Johnson, deployed 500,000 troops to Vietnam to fight a mistake of a war. A total of 58,220 young Americans, many of them draftees, lost their lives in Vietnam. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?” anti-war protesters chanted as they hounded LBJ out of public life. There were daily anti-war riots, burnings and bombings. Soldiers returning from the war were spit upon and called baby killers.
The people who bring you the news on television and in the newspapers should know about what went on during that stressful decade. President John F. Kennedy, who set the spark in Vietnam, was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Malcolm X, the black Muslim leader, was shot to death in New York by fellow Muslims on Feb. 21, 1965.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Three months later Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, running for president and seeking to end the Vietnam War, was assassinated in Los Angles on June 5, 1968. Prior to Robert Kennedy’s death, LBJ had accused him of “dividing the country.”
Three months after Robert Kennedy’s death, a massive, weeklong riot broke out at the Democrat Party convention in Chicago. Hundreds of anti-war, anti-LBJ demonstrators were clubbed, beaten and tear-gassed by the Chicago cops and the Army National Guard. Before and after the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King there were riots across the country. Not for nothing the year 1967 was called the “Long Hot Summer.” More than 100 race riots broke out in cities across the country, the most serious in Newark, Detroit and Chicago.
The decade ended in violence, just as it began, when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four anti-war students at a Kent State University protest rally May 4, 1970.
It was a nasty time, but the country held together. It will again.