Unhappy Crowd: Spare Us the "Woe is Me" Lament

Squawking about America has never been shriller.  Gun violence is spiraling out of control.  Racism is seething.  Trade wars are spiking prices.  The nation's political climate is toxic.  Homeless people are camped on streets of cities.  The whole country is a rotten stinking dung heap.

Day after day the piercing chorus is deafening.  For many Baby Boomers, including this writer, it has become nauseating.  The contempt, disgust and loathing from our fellow Americans is too much to stomach.  This country needs perspective, a quality missing in today's warped media reporting.

If you honestly believe America has never been this foul, you just haven't lived long enough. Not too many decades ago, this country was in the throes of race riots, soaring interest rates, double-digit inflation, high unemployment and one of the deadliest wars ever fought by our military.

Americans, especially Millennials, have either forgotten or never been taught American history.  As a timely reminder, here is a refresher on the turmoil that roiled the country from 1962 to 1981, a period that included political assassinations, cities in flames, an oil embargo and economic Armageddon.

During the Cold War with Russia in the 1960's,  President John F. Kennedy advised Americans to build bomb shelters as a precaution.  By 1965, 200,000 underground shelters speckled the American landscape. As school children, we were drilled to hide under a desk in the event of a nuclear attack.

Tensions boiled over in October 1962 when the U.S. discovered Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba.  The military blockaded Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from reaching the island.  Nuclear war appeared imminent. After a nerve-racking 13-day standoff, the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles.

Not long after, President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 by a gunmen who had visited Russia.  Less than 20 years later, President Ronald Reagan was shot, the bullet just missing vital organs sparing his life.  If a closely-guarded president could be killed or wounded, none of us felt safe.

During the period after 1963, ugly race riots broke out in major U.S. cities as African-Americans battled police in the streets.  National guard units had to be called up to restore peace.  Historians have called the riots the "most serious and widespread" ever in the U.S.

The social unrest flared in 1968 after civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was struck down by an assassin's bullet.  The news ignited riots in 110 cities across the country in a single night.  That same year Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy was murdered.

His death and the simmering anger over the Vietnam War combusted into the worst incident in American politics. At the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, violent confrontations exploded as police and protesters fought.  Demonstrators were beaten and tear gassed on national television.

The unpopular war in Asia, which lasted almost 20 years, ended with 58,220 American military causalities.  Another 304,000 soldiers returned home with crippling wounds. Many of my generation lost college mates, friends and family members.  Too many died forgotten in a war run by politicians.

For perspective, only the Civil War, World War I and World War II, eclipsed Vietnam as the deadliest conflicts in our history.

On the heels of the war, impeachment proceedings were launched by the House Judiciary Committee against President Richard M. Nixon, who was implicated in the break-in at a Democratic Party facility in the Watergate Hotel in Washington.  Under pressure, Nixon was forced to resign in 1974.

The nation barely exhaled when a Middle-East oil embargo kindled a gasoline shortage in the country.  Prices quadrupled at the pump overnight, shredding family budgets and triggering a nationwide panic.  Stations ran out of gas.  Fuel-starved cars were abandoned on the road.

During the height of the crisis, price gouging was rampant.  We waited in long lines of cars idling on roads leading to stations, snarling traffic and shortening tempers.  Mandatory limits of five-gallons of fuel per car were imposed by gas stations.  Daily commutes were often sidelined by empty gas tanks.

Then galloping inflation and high unemployment detonated.  From 1976 to 1980, car prices zoomed 72%.  The cost of new homes soared 67%.  In a single year 1979, gasoline prices rocketed up 60%.  Inflation spurted to 12.4% in 1980.  The prime interest rate topped 21% that same year.

Unemployment jumped to 9%.  Many firms laid off workers.  A new term was coined, The Misery Index, to quantify Americans' fears and anxieties over the economic morose.  Government wage and price controls, introduced to stem inflation, instead stunted an economic recovery.

During this era in the 1970's, the nation recorded the worst crime rate in its history.  There were 115.2 million crimes reported in that decade.  The highest murder rate in the country's history was in 1980, far outdistancing today's FBI homicide rate-per-population.   Crime became a hot political issue.

Perhaps, this brief history lesson will remind all Americans that our country has undergone more dire economic, political, race and violence-marred eras. That doesn't mean we should be sanguine about these times.  However, today's Americans deserve to have current events put into historical context.

It may not be the best of times but it certainly isn't the worst.  Not even close. Someone has to spread that message to quell the incessant wallowing in self-pity.  The media will not.   We must do it.