Donald Trump pumps his fist after an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania

“I was 10 years old when my uncle was assassinated and I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Fox News, hours after a bullet skimmed the side of Donald Trump’s head. Kennedy recalled the days after that tragedy in 1963. “There was a healing that took place,” he said.
Not five years later, Kennedy’s father lost his life at the hands of an assassin, just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Andy Warhol took a bullet the day before. More than half a century later, the Smithsonian describes 1968 as “the year that shattered America”.
Anti-war protests rocked campuses. Democrats planned to convene in Chicago. A man named Robert F. Kennedy was on the ballot. It may seem like we’ve been here before, but what if we never actually left?
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were both in their twenties during the year that “shattered” America. On cable news, RFK Jr shared memories of his father’s assassination only hours after yesterday’s attempt on Trump’s life. We’re at the bookend of the Baby Boom generation.
In 1967, the year before America “shattered”, Joan Didion famously opened “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with a placid description of the national mood. “It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege,” she wrote. “It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”
That apprehension turned out to be well-placed, and we’d be wise to consider the similarities: superficial comforts and cultural unrest. We’re not okay, regardless of the GNP.
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