Is 2020 worse than 1968?

Yes in that we as a humans have “still” not learned from past mistakes.

Yes, if only in that in 68 years we (as a society) have learned very little.

I was 10 years old in 1968, and while watching the news saw a black man running from the police and get shot in the back. I knew then, even as young as I was, that THAT is what the world would be about. So to me, as cookieman said, we have learned very little. It’s hard to change racist minds when that’s what they’ve learned and as an adult don’t want to change. It’s too sad. I grew up not seeing color and treat people according to how they treat me, not by the color of their skin. I only wish everyone would learn that. We’re all human and Americans.

1968 was worse….

We don’t have hundreds of draftees dying in Vietnam. That cast a pall on everything. We don;t have spiritual and political leaders murdered the way Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down.

Worse for whom? The rich have never had it so good in the history of the country. So what about the rest of us? For all the tumult defining the 60s, I recall a certainty in my head at the time that despite the aberrations, the country was headed overall in the right direction. What I didn’t and could not appreciate at the time was that I was living through the closing years of Roosevelt’s New Deal with the landmark enactment of the 2 civil rights bills, Medicare, the EPA and such heady concepts as equality for women and consumer protections. But I missed the mark by failing to think about just what it is that makes the clock tick, and why such aberrations as the war on Vietnam were possible. I was a big military history geek, and knowing what I knew about Vietnam and the actual history of Ho Chi Minh, I was flabbergasted that my government could be so bone headed as to assume the load the French had demonstrated so futile in the world through refusing to understand that the colonial era IS OVER. Actually these meanderings are a waste of time. You can answer this question simply by returning to the first sentence of my windy answer and ask yourself whether your parents believed you would do as well or better than they? Then look at your kids, and compare your answer to that question with that of your parents.

Not yet. They aren’t shooting innocent kids on college campuses yet.

There have been quite a few improvements since 1968, and quite a few declines.

What really stands out to me is the comparison of what’s in the White House:

In 1968, we elected Richard Nixon, who turned out to have bugged the DNC at the Watergate hotel, the corruption around which got him to resign his office and made him notorious as a terribly corrupt president, but he was an intelligent president, and he actually cared about the good of the nation, and founded the Environmental Protection Agency despite the environment not being a major political issue at the time. He also cared about health insurance reform for working-class people, children and the poor, supported HMOs and Medicare. He was interested and competent in world peace and non-cowboy diplomatic negotiations. People cared about the corruption scandal, and he left office rather than face the judgement of Congress.

In 2020, we’ve had four years with a corrupt idiot as president who doesn’t seem to actually care about much of anything except himself and siphoning as much wealth and power as possible to the ultra-rich. He’s been trying to undermine and abolish as many environmental protection policies as possible. He’s been trying to help Republicans erode or eradicate the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Social Security, the United States Postal Service, etc etc etc. He’s an international laughing stock and horrifies our allies with his incompetent, ignorant and blustery loose-cannon international relations. When impeached by the House, as with the Muller investigation and the emoluments violations and the insane nepotism towards Kutchner and his daughter not to mention his own profiteering, he tried to make out that he was a victim of conspiracies. And the news media and far too much of the public largely don’t seem to think any of the endless list of misbehavior or idiocy warrants throwing him out of office.

No, not yet.