EDITORIAL
1968: TEH YEKRH AFTER If recent American history has a symbolic year in which all the major currents of cultural, political and religious history came together, it is 1968. It was, on one level,...
...Today we are worried more about the crass and subtle influence of South Korean cash in our political life than about what the North Koreans have done to our military honor...
...Meanwhile, ten years ago, Eugene McCarthy reminded the American Cmnmonweal: 291 electorate that it was still possible to run for president on a moral issue...
...Perhaps that is one way to help the wounds of '68 to close...
...It was, on one level, the year of 2001, Yellow Submarine and Hair...
...Ten years ago next September Newsweek's cover featured Hubert H. Humphrey's face, superimposed against a tense, harsh photo of helmeted troops brandishing rifles in front of the Chicago Hilton--winner of a bloody victory which, in the minds of many, le~t him morally destroyed...
...Today the black poor for whom King died are still poor...
...Today, most Catholics have forgotten the encyclical and accepted contraception, and they are less likely to listen to what the church says on any issue...
...And the latest trend in university education is renewed interest in teaching moral values...
...Ten years agp this summer Pope Paul V,I, true to his own understanding of the need to uphold papal authority, and against the advice of his own commission, published Humanae Vitae...
...Ten years ago, North Korea seized the Pueblo...
...The protest ended when the police broke heads...
...It was the week when we all saw the film clips and front page photos of the South Vietnamese policeman blowing the brains out of the head of the Viet Cong suspect in the middle of the street--the picture that finally prodded the too-long-silent Robert F. Kennedy to stand up on the Senate floor and ask what had happened to America...
...On another, of assassinations, Armies ol the Night, Cancer Ward, Catonsville, upheaval in the church, and the Apollo VIII vision of the other side of the moon...
...At San Francisco State the president got tough and ended his strike by breaking heads as well...
...12 May 1978:292...
...but he musters his energies to be, as well as he can, another Christ...
...Therefore he was killed and, in angry answer, the ghettos of the nation went up in flame...
...At Columbia University a relative handful of students led by the SDS occupied a couple of buildings to protest the university's complicity with the war and its putting up a gym that would encroach on its Harlem neighborhood...
...but nevertheless, 1978 is a time of tenth anniversaries--to many a time to remember wounds, to ask to what degree they have healed and what, if anything, we have learned...
...but ironically his spirit seems to have so freed his native South from racism that the Southern white governor who hung his portrait in the Georgia State House could become President...
...Thus some good men will be remembered for their political vision, some for the nobility of their final sentiments...
...Today we can also understand Tet as the psychological turning point that enabled us as a nation to do the right thing--re-examine our commitment for the imperfect reason--not because of the unjustified evil we were doing in Vietnam but because we "winners" were starting to "lose...
...Today Pope Paul approaches the end of his life...
...Two weeks ago, giving up the papal "we" which emphasizes his remoteness and his authority, he wrote to the kidnappers of Aldo Moro: " . . . restore the Honorable Aldo Moro to freedom, . . . I love him as a member of the great human family . . . I beg you on my knees...
...Last week's Newsweek's cover story featured the other Humphrey--wasted and smiling, surrounded by children, public to the last, teaching the nation how a brave man dies...
...It is still not clear what 1968 meant...
...Ten years ago Martin Luther King announced his plans to march on Washintgon with thousands of poor people who would set up tents on the capitol grounds and demand their share of the nation's wealth...
...Ironically, he undermined papal authority in his attempt to save it...
...Ten years ago students everywhere began demanding the unqualified "right" to do "their own thing" with their sex lives...
...Ten years ago the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive in a way that suddenly and dramatically convinced the American press, congressional leadership and a vast segment of the American public that the Vietnam war was not what they thought it was...
...Today the Columbia gym has been built as planned and the tough San Francisco State president, the eccentric S. I. Hayakawa, sits in the United States Senate...
...Today some historians and journalists debate over whether at Tet our side "really" won or lost--applying, alas, some of the same guidelines, like casualty figures, that had us consistently "winning" that terrible lost war...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
