I was reading The Daily Beast earlier today. In it there is an article called “Summer of Hate: 25 signs trouble is brewing.”  It’s just what the title implies: it lists 25 events in the American world since June of this year that seem to point toward a (probably) immanent explosion of violence like, perhaps, the one we saw in 1968 (which the article briefly mentions). It’s a nice title, since it gets its power from mocking the 1967 Summer of Love.

I remember 1968.  I was 12 and had moved from the northeast of the US to Houston, Texas. When Martin Luther King was shot, I had been in town less than a year. I didn’t know how to comport myself in the place. I didn’t know it wasn’t OK to let my dark-skinned neighbor child (a Mexican foster kid staying with a white foster mommy) into my house, and that based on that transgression, my neighbors’ parents wouldn’t let them play with me.  I didn’t know that my voice (with its faint British accent) would arouse such suspicion.  I didn’t know that it was OK for the white teachers in my school to reduce the Mexican-American Spanish teacher to tears by refusing to allow her to sit in the teachers’ lounge.  I was pretty stupid really and because of that I was kicked out of the sixth grade. (It was my first, but not last, expulsion.) I probably deserved it; I was terminally insolent.  I have to admit, to them, I was probably a really nasty little brat.

I wasn’t particularly well informed as a child, especially not politically.  What I remember really are the sensations, the fear, the tension: the mouths, spittle flecked, purse lipped, and the eye glare.  When we first moved to town we stayed in a hotel right near a hospital, which happened to be only a short distance from an all-black neighborhood. Not that I knew that at the time, but it explained why I so quickly took to hiding and listening in secret dark spots.  The tension between the people who populated the hospital staff, the internationally travelled surgeons and research personnel, the whites in the area, and the near-by black residents who still had the occasional essentially unpaved street, shacks with no air conditioning and a plague of silverfish, roaches and rats, was enormous. They were all right there next to one of the most advanced hospitals in the world and they didn’t get along very well.  I didn’t understand it, but I could feel it. I responded by developing my natural sneakiness.

That was the year I heard about the concerned fathers of Houston who turned over the school bus with a bunch of black children in it.  I remember hearing about it, but it was on the sly. My parents spoke about it in hushed tones, huddled together in the dining room. They didn’t know I was there, hidden as I was behind the green baize screen separating the area from the living room. I got a lot of my knowledge of the world that way.  I told you…I was a nasty, sneaky little kid.

That year was bad. Some very good people were killed because of the hate and fear and there were some very prominent people who turned out to be angry lunatics. I mean Robert Kennedy was assassinated five years after his brother. Then there was a police riot at the Democratic National Convention: imagine various domestic “armies,” civilian, police, and the para-military National Guard, fighting it out in the streets. Mr Avalon could be right – that we are headed for another eruption. ”True believers“ whether religious or political, like the cyclic Great Awakenings or regular resurgence of homegrown terrorists like the right-wing nut-job Timothy McVeigh or the guy who shot George Tiller, seem to be endemic to the American world, resulting in and from regular bouts of hysterical social blindness. Still, once ’68 was over, civil rights did keep coming, the Vietnam War did end, and us liberal types did not bring on, as it turns out, the Apocalypse.

The ’67 Summer of Love turned into the ’68 Summer of Hate–so what happened in ’69? Oh yeah…the Stonewall Riots and we walked on the moon. I may not have much faith in the existence of group rationality, but I do have faith in history.  Based on it, I suspect we will survive our current crop of enraged loons, and next year there might be some interesting things to come.