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1968, February: the TET Offensive in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite declares the Vietnam War UNWINNABLE! April: the assassination of Martin Luther King. May: LBJ declares he is not running for re-election. June: the Assassination of Robert Francis Kennedy, July: 150 Cities are in flames from race rioting! August: The Soviet Union and three Eastern Block countries invade Czechoslovakia and Freedom President Alexander Dubcek. November: the election of Richard Milhaus Nixon. Throughout the year: The war in Vietnam had killed over 28,000 American Soldiers (16,899 in 1968 alone!) and wounded over 150 thousand since 1965. The Vietnam War and the Space Industry ramps up the American Economy! The Paris Peace talks then flounder after the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Muscle cars become all the rage! Gasoline is 35 cents a gallon! The population of the United States was almost 201 million residents. A one bedroom apartment was renting for about $125 dollars a month.
C-Span is commemorating 1968 as the 50th Anniversary of an “Exceptional Year” in American History. The questions that remain are many. We were in Nuremberg, Germany stationed with the 2nd Armored Cavalry as a Cryptographic Teletype Operator in Headquarters Troop at Regiment Headquarters in August of 1968. The Russian, East German, Romanian and Bulgarian Tanks (4 Divisions) were gathered on the Czech border facing Germany – firing their weapons occasionally and trying to incite an escalation of activities. By autobahn, if they broached the border, they could have been in Nuremberg in 45 minutes. Our troops simply returned fire as was received. Meanwhile, along that border the Czech border soldiers were bringing us soup and we were giving them coffee. Meanwhile, our embedded nukes along the border seemed to be the correct deterrent to any invasion by Soviet forces!
In this crazy 2018, we have yet another idiot in charge of our country. It seems the number of stupid Presidents of the United States far outweigh the number of good ones…..judged by history alone. They say that six Presidents were involved with the Vietnam War: Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. We point to the following Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George and Laura Bush, Barack and Michelle Obama and now Donald J. Trump. Each one has had their proponents. Each one did one or two things right. Maybe, that’s all we need….a President that can do one or two things right? We can say, that if we really wanted to judge our Presidents correctly, we should just statistically find out how many U.S. Soldiers died during their Administrations. Those killing the least, might be considered successful Presidents. Those killing the most…..the worst. We guess we could Google all this….but we leave that to all the Mothers out there on this Mothers Day 2018!
In just a couple of weeks will be celebrating Memorial Day. This is when we are supposed to offer appreciation for all those that have died in the service of their country. Today, we should probably include the number of citizens that have been killed by Big Pharma, Big Agra, Big Chema, Big Medicine, Big Oil and Big Insurance! As the Hyman Roth said in Godfather II: “This is the business we have chosen, it’s not personal….just business!” Again: Happy Mothers Day America!
Possibly the most interesting piece for today’s implications: “A one bedroom apartment was renting for about $125 dollars a month.” Minimum wage was $1.60, so a person working 200 hours per month could take home $320 (less taxes): very tight, but enough to get by.
Most Americans were better off in 1968 than they had been in 1958. Most Americans could get by without dual income streams. That would be less common in 1978, and far less common in 1988.
For the generation that grew up after 1968, the heaviest burdens by far fell on mothers, who needed to not only work to earn enough for rent/mortgage, but raise the kids, keep house, etc. Yeah, worth keeping in mind if we give them a day of love.
Donovan, also….most kids left home at 18 or earlier. They shared apartments and this was the beginning of boys and girls being live-in roommates. That meant that the one bedroom could be split, so all those pretty girls that worked at the Snack Shop or Bob’s Big Boy as waitresses could easily afford rent, utilities and gas for their new VW bug too! We just heard that a One Bedroom Apartment in Seattle is now at $3000 dollars a month. Add utilities and now gas at $5 bucks a gallon and you are talking real money…just to live. Want to have kids? Now we are talking Mega-Bucks!
Absolutely, Ron & Anna. It was never easy to be a mother (I suspect, as a man). But what made things hard a generation ago makes it an order of magnitude harder today (and add in college debt, and one understands why women who want children put things off, or miss out entirely).
And yet…when I walked into Sprouts this morning @ 8 am, 80%+ of the shoppers were ladies – several mothers with young children. These are among the most beautiful ladies in Fullerton: thinking through the world they live in, they are also among the most impressive.
*Yep, the good news is those mom’s are buying good food for their kids….the bad news is….the price keeps going up. Mom’s are great!
*We probably should mention the Palestinian deal today. 50 more casualties and many more to come. The Israeli’s love to kill Palestinians…..it is their favorite sporting endeavor. They don’t have Bull Fighting or Cock Fighting……so we suppose they have to have something to entertain their citizens. The Settlements are always fun too. Have your military run into a neighborhood, have your developers tear everything down and rebuild some nice housing for your expanding population base. Kicking out the Palestinians and moving them to Gaza….then occasionally bomb when things get boring. Andy Jackson would have been proud.
As a Jew I also hear relatives here in good old America talk about the Palestinians, “The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian” they rave. And if you talk to a Palestinian they say from what I have read “the only good Jew is a dead Jew”.
Houston we have a problem!
Thomas Friedman seems to have it half right: Jerusalem should have been traded for the Embassy for a freeze on the Settlements. Blaming Hamas or Hezbollah is like Blaming Bibi for everything, him and his Lukud Party! Those arguments go nowhere as you say. As we have stated in the past, give the Palestinians the TWO State Solution, take the Water in the Golan Heights and Remove and/or Integrate all the existing Settlements in the West Bank. Allow Palestinians to immigrate to those Settlements. Yeah…Peace in our time!
So where do we rate Lincoln and Rossenfelt? The most Americans died the greatest presidents.
Maybe it should be who killed the most people overall, men, women and children in other countries and Nixon wins. 5,000,000 Vietnamese alone and 80,000,000 unexploded bombs in Laos and Cambodia still today that no president since has paid to clean up by the way!
*The best one of course, are the areas in Vietnam where we laid down tons of Agent Orange and never cleaned it up….leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of non fertile, cancer causing land to kill the existing Vietnamese population! The VA continues to deal with all the Cancer Cases caused by that mishap….eh? Monsanto and Dupont are still on the job and working hard to build another Exposition at Disneyland…..eh?