If you look back to the 1960s, there is reason to fear that more violence is coming, writes journalist Laura Saarikoski.
Laura Saarikoski
The United States seems to be living in crazy years like the 1960s.
At that time, the baby boomers born after the war challenged old values, blacks fought for their civil rights, the Vietnam War divided the nation and the e-pill revolutionized sex and women’s lives. Television brought arguments and protests into living rooms.
It didn’t bleed.
President John F. Kennedy, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
American cities burned in race riots. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War spread around the world.
When power was redistributed, the United States changed too quickly, according to some, too slowly, according to others.
Now the United States is in a similar transition. In the opinion of believers and conservatives, the country has changed too quickly, in the opinion of minorities and liberals, too slowly.
Some brings disputes to everyone’s screen in real time.
This time too, the change is not easy, because both camps believe that the other party is a threat to their own basic rights and self-esteem.
Many Donald Trump’s supporters are genuinely concerned about their standard of living, but perhaps even more so about whether their way of life is valued in the US anymore.
Have those others taken their land from them?
“This is where the war starts,” assured one older man I interviewed in Pennsylvania on Sunday after Trump’s assassination attempt.
He was ready to offer a foreign journalist asylum for the duration of the war.
Many president Joe Biden supporters, on the other hand, fear that they may be deprived of the rights achieved as a result of the civil rights struggle of the past decades.
Women fear the scrapping of the right to abortion, sexual minorities the repeal of the right to marriage. Are they allowed to be themselves in America, they ask.
“Trump is a dictator”, said a woman who supports Democrats on Sunday in Pennsylvania.
You can sometimes make compromises about the economy and politics, but it is more difficult when it comes to identities. That would require the ability to live and let others live. There is too little of that kind of attitude in the United States now, and even more anger and anxiety.
History is a pendulum movement: from Obama to Trump, from Trump to Biden – and now back to Trump?
Conflicts of values never justify violence, and the motives of Trump’s shooter are not even clear yet.
If you look back to the 1960s, however, there is reason to fear that more violence is on the way before the next era begins in the United States.
The author is a journalist specializing in the United States.