You would hope that history teaches,
But I’m afraid it merely preaches:
That upon the simple ears it reaches,
Would recall, to not repeat—
The injustices—it admonishes.
Fair Use 2020
“More than a few commentators have drawn sometimes shaky comparisons between the current moment and 1968, the year when, in April, Dr. King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis. In June, Robert Kennedy was murdered at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, after winning the California primary… At the Democratic Convention that summer, in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley cracked down brutally on anti-war protesters in Grant Park. Richard Nixon won the Presidency. And, as few remember, there was also a flu pandemic; the H3N2 virus killed at least a million people, including a hundred thousand Americans.
Perhaps the deepest frustration of thinking about 1968 and 2020 is the time elapsed, the opportunities squandered, the lip service paid. In the realm of criminal justice, the prison population began to skyrocket under Ronald Reagan and kept on accelerating for decades, until midway through the Obama Administration. Black Lives Matter began, in 2013, at least in part because even the Obama Presidency, for all its promise, proved unable to exert anything like a decisive influence on issues of racism and police abuse.”
Excerpts from: An American Uprising | David Remnic | The New Yorker
