Our Need For History To Repeat

Fifty years ago, tonight.

Christmas Eve, 1968.

1968 had been a total shit show of a year. The country was tearing itself apart. Every single day’s news brought another nightmare.

Vietnam, starting with Tet

North Korea & USS Pueblo

Racism

Prague

Paris

Politics – Johnson was not running, Nixon was and got elected

Martin Luther King had been assassinated

Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago had been surrounded by riots

Olympics protests

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I was twelve and we were living in the suburbs outside of Chicago. I remember wondering how far the riots would spread and my father, who worked downtown, not being sure that he should or could go into his office.

The country was desperate.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, fifty years ago tonight, three brave men gave us what we needed.

For the first time, people from this small, blue dot saw Earthrise with their own eyes.

Photo courtesy of NASA

I’ll never forget it.

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Now here we are, fifty years later. Christmas Eve, 2018.

2018 has been a total shit show of a year. The country is tearing itself apart. Every single day’s news has brought another nightmare.

Racism, actively encouraged by the ruling political party

Politics – Trump is a clinically insane madman, a fascist, a wanna-be dictator, and a traitorous tool of Putin

We have children and innocent people being slaughtered by the thousands while the NRA funnels illegal Russian money into keeping Trump and his ilk in power

The economy is suddenly in freefall as billionaires got monstrous tax cuts, the stock market has now dropped into a bear market in less than a month, and millions lost health care

The fools in power in Washington have now shut down the government, leaving millions of federal employees not knowing when they’ll get their next pay check, and then they have the gaul to act like it’s a good thing

There are tens of thousands of immigrant children who have been separated from their parents and put into concentration camps with no accountability

The extremists in Washington are trying to return to the isolationist tactics that worked so well prior to World War I while ignoring the centuries of immigration and inclusiveness that literally made the US the world power that it was

We have been turned into THE BAD GUYS! We have been turned into the kind of insane, totalitarian regime that we used to go to war to overturn. I can’t put it any more plainly than that.

So here, on Christmas Eve 2018, fifty years to the night after Borman, Lovell, and Anders gave us a reason to hold onto hope, let’s pray that history repeats itself, SOON, and we get that lift we need.

Because it’s going to get ugly quickly in 2019 if we don’t.