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.

Racism: Memories of Mississippi

What I remember about growing up in Mississippi were the hateful signs.  They were posted near restrooms, lunch counters, bus terminals and other public areas.  One read: Whites Only.  The other said: Colored. The message was clear:  The color of your skin dictated how you were treated.

Colored meant inferior.  Unequal.  It was racism at its ugliest.  The year was 1960 and Dr. Martin Luther King's nascent civil rights movement was gaining national momentum.  In Mississippi, he was crowned with the derisive sobriquet Dr. Martin Luther Coon.  Racial hatred knew no bounds.

In 1961, I became eligible to earn a driver's license at age 15.  Mississippi had lowered the driving age to accommodate the state's agricultural industry.  Farm kids by necessity were operating family tractors and trucks on roads and highways.  The land was tilled and harvested by blacks.

During a lunch break, my Dad ushered me into the Driver's License Bureau office.  When he cracked the door, the waiting room was sardined with people, all of them African-American.  My Dad glanced around and tugged my arm and whispered: "We'll have to come back some other day."

Before we reached the door, a voice called: "Are you here for a driver's license?"  My Dad answered in the affirmative.  A state trooper motioned us to follow him into his office.  He closed the door and smirked: "None of those ("n" word) are getting a license today.  The dumb asses can't read."

My license exam began after the trooper plopped his feet on his desk. What color is a stop sign?  Red.  How about a yield sign?  Yellow.  He grinned, "You passed the written test."  He ordered me to drive Dad's car around the block.  "If you don't hit any cars, you pass the driving test." 

I never forgot the looks on those black faces as I strutted out the door.  Instead of feeling elated about getting my license, I dawned on me that I was part of a conspiracy to deprive African-Americans of their right to legally drive.  It was a cruel way to punish a people simply for being born black.

The other seminal event in my education about racism occurred in 1962. I was in high school when the first black student (James Meredith) attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.  The state's governor vowed to block his path.  A group of whites rioted at the campus.

Amidst the turmoil, students at my high school were kept informed about developments by announcements over the intercom.  When Meredith was initially rebuffed from enrolling, the classroom erupted in whoops of applause.  The song "Dixie" blared over the intercom.

Confederate flags became a symbol of resistance.  Flags were duct tapped to radio antennas of cars and pickup trucks at school.  A few students boasted about plans to load up their vehicles with guns and speed to Oxford to prevent that ("n" word") from stepping foot near lily white Ole Miss.

I was ashamed of my state.  Dr. King, in his famous speech "I Have a Dream," pointedly referred to Mississippi as a state "sweltering with the heat of injustice." Racism was an epidemic, oozing from every corner of life.  Decades removed, I can't fathom how blacks survived with their dignity intact.

More than 60 years later, change has crawled into Mississippi.  Signs no longer taunt blacks.  About 12 percent of students at Ole Miss are African-Americans.  Mississippi leads the nation in black home ownership. However, too many blacks continue to live in stinging poverty.   

For many, change has been agonizingly slow in a state where African-Americans account for 37 percent of the population, the highest in America. Mississippi remains No. 1 among all states in poverty (21.9%) and illiteracy (21.5%). But sometimes change is about more than statistics.

On a visit to the state capitol Jackson several years ago, I was gobsmacked to walk into an an upscale hotel restaurant and find blacks seated at three or four tables.  They appeared right at home where once African-Americans donned aprons instead of dinner napkins.  The wait staff was mostly white.

Waitresses addressed their African-American customers as "Sir" and "Ma'am."  One black customer registered a complaint about the food.  The waitress was respectful and accommodating.  That doesn't represent waves of progress in most states.  But in Mississippi, it qualifies as a tsunami.

It has been 50 years since Dr. King was gunned down in Memphis.  The man once scorned by Mississippians might be surprised to witness blacks and whites together in a college classroom studying about the civil rights movement.  Dr. King would have surveyed the situation and thundered:

"Free at last, Free at last, Great God almighty, we are Free at last!"  But he might have added: "It's about time."