PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Where were you in 1968?

Recalling that tempestuous year is a bit like remembering where you were in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated or in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to walk on the moon.

There was not just one event in 1968. They were many, as this blog details below.

For my part, I was in college at Seattle Pacific College (now Seattle Pacific University), at about the middle point of my four years there. With the Vietnam War in full swing, I was concerned about my future – or, frankly, whether I would have one.

The year 1968 served as the pivot for a recent column by Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The headline for his piece termed “1968 as the year that politics collapsed.”

It went on to say that 1968 also was the year that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump graduated from college.

The year also was important enough that the Smithsonian Magazine devoted its entire January-February 2018 edition to a retrospective on 1968 — and I am still reading the magazine to recall even more events.

Meanwhile, here’s more from Henninger:

“The modern era of American politics—defined by polarization and nonstop intensity—began with the cataclysmic events of 1968, now celebrating, if that’s the right word, its 50th anniversary.

“Everyone says the pace of events in the Trump presidency is overwhelming. Compared with 1968, the past year has been a walk in the park.

“It is impossible to understand the relevance of that year (1968) without a timeline.

“Jan. 23: The USS Pueblo and its 82 survivors are captured and taken hostage by North Korea. On Jan. 30, North Vietnam launches the notorious Tet Offensive, including an invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. March 12, Minnesota’s Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy comes within a few hundred votes in the New Hampshire primary of upsetting President Lyndon B. Johnson. Within three weeks, Johnson announces he will not seek his party’s presidential nomination.

“Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis. Urban riots break out across the U.S. April 23: Students occupy offices at Columbia University until police storm the building a week later. June 3: Andy Warhol is shot in New York by Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, or “Society for Cutting Up Men.”

“Then, on June 5, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated at a Los Angeles hotel.

“August 8: Republicans nominate Richard Nixon. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia.

“In late summer during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, police fight a pitched battle with antiwar protesters in Grant Park. In October, at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise gloved fists as a black-power salute during a medal ceremony.

“November 5: Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey and a third-party populist, former and future Alabama Governor George Wallace, who in the spirit of the times told a group of antiwar protesters: ‘I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers.’”

Historians have tried to decipher the volcanic eruptions in 1968.  For some, it was the emerging political power of televised images; Vietnam was called “the living-room war.” That was true for me as I watched my generation serve on a battlefield while many at home demonstrated against their service, even reviling them as the likely one returned from the war.

For his part, Henninger posits that 1968 “marked the start of political polarization. Contrary to current myth, the civil-rights legislation of a few years before was bi-partisan. With the Vietnam War, unity began to unravel.”

The late 1960s, he says, saw the beginning of left-liberal moral triumphalism. The opposition was no longer just wrong. It was morally suspect. For a new generation of Democrats, which increasingly included the so-called “politically neutral press,” the Vietnam War was opposed as, simply, “a bright shining lie.”

Some 10 years later, inevitably, Henninger adds, the religious right emerged.

So, here we are today, fractured by politics and technology into myriad cultural subsets of separations that began in 1968.

For me, two points are true here.

One – we have come a long way since 1968, at least in terms of the passage of time. Things are different today as we talk to each other by mobile device no matter where we are, as we contend with a pervasive social media that confronts us at every turn, as we look at a president who defies normal norms for the most important political position in the country, if not the world, and as we limit trust in almost any institution, including those that have thrown away any reason or building trust.

Two – as a people, we are even more divided today than back in 1968. Our political views illustrate that division every day and, more and more certain of those who represent us in government work to capitalize on that division.

My fond wish today, 50 years after the grueling year of 1968, is that we would find a way to honor humanity and work together for the common good.