Saturday Sentiment: Tumultuous Times

We've been reminded of 1968 this week. MLK was shot and killed 40 years ago yesterday and reference has been made to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy just two months later. There was a war of questionable intention that was going on overseas that had started 5 years prior, escalated by a Democratic president. His popularity, too, declined significantly and the incumbent president surprised the nation by not running for a second term, leaving the field open. Turbulence at political party conventions made front page news. Social unrest was at its peak. Any of this sound familiar?


My dad took this picture of my older brother Hans, me and my mom in November 1969. I was born six months earlier during a multiday standoff known as the People's Park Riots between demonstrating UC Berkeley students and the police, ordered by Governor Ronald Reagan and California Attorney General Edwin Meese, which culminated on "Bloody Thursday" when a Cal student was fatally shot. While the violence hadn't yet erupted the day I was born (on Saturday, the 10th), I'd been told that my dad had to take a circuitous route in to the hospital to get around the area that had been cordoned off.

On my last visit to my home state of California, my mom and I took a day trip to my birthplace Berkeley. As we drove past a Safeway, she mentioned that during that tumultuous time, she would ask my dad to come home during his lunchtime to watch me (my brother was probably at school), so that she could do the grocery shopping. She didn't dare take her babies to public places.

Students for a Democratic Society had bombed police cars in February 1970. Just a few years later, the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army, which took hold in this California town) would kidnap heiress Patty Hearst in her Berkeley apartment.

Did you even know that Ted Kaczynski (the unabomber) was a Math professor at Berkeley at the time? (He resigned. Apparently, his students found him to be aloof.) My friend Kristin would find it quite interesting that after he left Berkeley in the summer of 1969, he moved in with his parents in Lombard, Illinois. I always knew we had a special connection.

Amazing what you can find out on Wikipedia, huh?

Times were uncertain, indeed.