Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Please don't

Dear "liberal big-time pundit",
I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's equally historic campaigns, and because today's Democrats have been given a chance -- as they were not in 1968 -- to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades.

I'm begging you - please don't make this presidential election about 1968. I say this as a person who stands on the shoulders of that generation and who shares many of their ideals. Seriously, though. Just. Don't.

I know it's tempting. Every election in which I've ever participated (dating back to 1992) has been about the 1960s. Draft dodging, dope smoking, bra burning... yup, we've had to rehash it all. "The Sixties generation is in power!" "We're going to smash the Sixties once and for all!" Now we have a presumptive candidate who (on a lesser historical note) is post-Boomer, who witnessed that decade not as a participant, but as a child.

And you want to start making comparisons back to the Sixties, exactly the turf that the GOP wants us to tread. You don't think they've been stockpiling all that shit on Bill Ayers for nothing, do you?

I'm not saying that there aren't important lessons to be learned from that time, and I'm certainly not implying that we've moved past the big problems that so piqued the consciences of that generation. But we must stop framing our political discourse as a running feud about what went right and wrong in the 1960s.

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