1968 Was a Unique Year - Essay Example

Something that was not planned is some of the issues that contributed 1968 to being a unique year (Mark 324).

This year is considered unique because people started to rebel over very few issues. All the people had the same capacity to desire to rebel and it was something that had not been planned or organized. The issue rebel was antipathy for authoritarianism and a sense of being estranged from the established order. According to Kurlansky, this is the year television was shaping most of the events apart from reporting events all around the whole world. This is the time public demonstrations were being presented… on television. It is very few people were that were needed to fill the frame of a TV camera. It happens that Martin Luther King together with his media-understanding brothers had got the message first and demonstrations had become a common event on American campuses by 1968.

Mingle the worry of the cold war. Horror against the men that were old in power and the crippled society that sustained them, fundamental distaste for the Vietnamese conflict, and someone had a cocktail of requests ready mixed. People met through the television viewing picture of each other on the screen. There was no established relationship between each other but there was a relationship with what their imagination gave from viewing pictures of each other. The action of cameras and lights made young people have moods; some people ended up paving stones and lunged at an established order too foolish to convert the other side.

Bobby Kennedy already saw his followers sliding when he died. This made everyone believe that Bobby Kennedy could not have won. On 4th April 1968 after Martin Luther King was killed howlers started in the areas of black inhabitants all across America. Unlike in Indianapolis where there was a lot of peace, maybe in some parts because another national leader who was respected by the blacks was in the city the day of riots. On 4th April 1968, Bobby Kennedy decided to speak and he called a meeting and informed the people that he had bad news that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed the previous night. It followed that two months later Bobby Kennedy was also killed by the assassin (Mark 333).

It was the 35th Democratic National Convention in 1968 and this is when the delegates arrived in Chicago. There was an army full of protesters from all across the country flowing into the city, camping everywhere. What came after all this was very serious and most pessimists could not foresee. The Chicago convention turned into riots assassinations and a collapse in law and order and this made people conclude that the country was coming apart. It destroyed politicians' faith in the political systems in their countries and all the institutions of the country.

All these main issues had not been witnessed again in all years it happens to make this year a unique one in world history and it will live to linger in people's minds in all the days of their life. Read More