This commentary is by Eric Peterson, a theater director and columnist who lives in Bennington.
Since 1968, I have been convinced that was the worst year for the United States that I would live through. The U.S. was at war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King was murdered and a few months later Robert Kennedy, a presidential candidate, was killed. There was fighting in the streets of Chicago as the Democrats nominated Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to become the next president while the Republicans’ choice was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon.
Two men of the future were dead and America’s choice was now between two men of the past. Nixon’s narrow victory brought us more years of war and the Watergate scandal. All in all, a horrific year.
Now I worry next year, 2024, could be the worst year.
In 1968, I was a student, living in New York City’s Spanish Harlem, in a four-room railroad apartment for $90.12 a month. Like so many of my generation, I had long hair, a silly-looking Fu Manchu mustache and wore the hippie hopeful uniform of work shirts and bell-bottom jeans. Everyone I knew was, in the words of Benjamin of “The Graduate,” “worried about my future.”
That was long ago but I still remember the lingering fears that enveloped the country.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
William Yeats’ prediction seemed, at that time, to be coming true. His great poem seems prescient once again. The poem’s title, after all, is “The Second Coming.” Now, 55 years later, the worry is, I might have been wrong all this time, and as bad as things look today, next year might just be the worst year I will live through.
Global warming is destroying the world and the world is paying far too little attention. July could have been the world’s hottest month ever. A Guardian headline proclaimed this “The Era of Global Boiling.” Western states are burning up day after day.
Our lovely Green Mountain state, thought by many to be a refuge from the worst of climate change, this year has gone from modest drought to horrendous floods.
Climatic changes are impossible to ignore, but nonetheless, too many money-guzzling corporations, timid governments and passive indiviuals largely ignore what we all know must be done.
Putin’s senseless war against Ukraine is killing innocent men, women and children, destroying cities, towns, farmland, much of the world’s needed wheat. In the long-ago antiwar phrase, Russian aggression is “destroying a civilization and creating a desert.”
The United States is providing Ukraine with cluster bombs that over 100 countries have banned because of the indiscriminate havoc they bring to, not only a war’s combatants, but to civilians. We are supplying these particular weapons because our supply of other armaments is greatly depleted. For what is, perhaps the first time in our history, the United States is unable to make enough ammunition fast enough.
A criminal is once again the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president. According to reports, the orange one plans to short-circuit the legal charges against him by simply pardoning himself once he again becomes president. His closest Republican opponent is a bigoted, pro-slavery, unlikeable blowhard with delusions of adequacy.
The Democratic Party is led by an unappreciated but transformative president who is already the oldest president ever and who wants to keep the job until he is 86 years old, old enough to know better.
At this writing, more than 400 Americans have been killed by guns thus far in 2023. Overseas, Israel appears to be throwing away its democracy with thousands demonstrating in the streets. The United Kingdom is finally waking up to the fact that Brexit was the worst idea they’ve ever had. But have no plans to return to the European Union.
Italy’s elected leader is a member of Mussolini’s old party and is welcome at the White House. The French are demonstrating in the streets because the government wants to increase the age of retirement because the country’s coffers are going broke. Television writers and actors are on strike so, come the new fall season, our only choices will be ancient game shows, or reruns on overly expensive streaming services that we didn’t enjoy the first time.
And if things weren’t bad enough, there is already talk of a sequel to the “Barbie” movie. What else could go wrong?
Why will next year be worse? Because nearly half the country wants to return a malignant narcissist to power. After he pardons himself and his cronies, he will install them in important positions running the government. His opponents will be arrested by a Justice Department that will be the antithesis of justice.
Somehow we got through 1968. But the loss of MLK dealt a devastating blow to the progress that was being made in civil rights. RFK’s murder meant the next president didn’t quickly end the war in Vietnam. And, oh yes, there was that scandal we call Watergate.
A series of miracles is needed to get the United States and the world back on the right track. There is still time, but time is quickly running out. What can be done to head off this looming disaster?
