When Anything Could Happen

 

People think that the Sixties is when everything changed. That is true, is a civilizational sense. But the changes didn't impact American psyche in a deep sense until the Seventies. The Seventies is when the rapid change happened.

I was telling J about the years around when she was born. I remember the election of 1972. It was in Second Grade. It was almost the same time as the last Apollo mission to the Moon, right before the Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl in the only perfect season to date.

Nixon won in a thundering landslide that surprised no one. The nation rejected McGovern and the Democrats soundly, showing their ineptitude in connecting to ordinary Americans. McGovern won only effete liberal Massachusetts. 

We were living at the time in a small town in northwest Iowa, in the county along the Minnesota border. Our television stations came from three states, including stations from Mankato, Sioux City, and Sioux Falls. 

It was in the region called the Iowa Great Lakes, which are a small cluster of lakes that are the the southernmost tip of the giant region of pothole lakes stretching down through Minnesota and crossing the border into Iowa near the headwaters of the Des Moines River, to give Iowa a small resort region it otherwise would have.

We lived a block from one of the lakes. We lived at the corner where the street alongside our house dead-ended at the lake. In winter it froze and one could walk out onto it. In summer one could push small craft into it, and go fishing. 

I was one of two people in our class to vote for McGovern in the class election. The other person was a girl named Jean. Everyone else voted for Nixon. 

How quickly everything changed. By the end of that Presidential term, two different individuals held the Presidency and the Vice Presidency, neither of whom had been elected to national office. 

It all happened between November 1972 and December 1974, just a little over two years. It was during those two years that America re-defined itself as a nation in decline. It was as if the hammer blows of the changes in the Sixties finally caught up to America, and the national psyche collapsed under the weight of the changes, and began to mutate.

After that, any kind of change seemed possible for a while. Those of us who remember the late Seventies remember the feeling of cultural instability, and wondering if it would ever stop. By 1979 the era of American confidence seemed far in the past.

We were all a bit surprised that in the Eighties things seemed to stabilize a bit. The momentum of rapid cultural change slackened, at least on the surface. Even those of us who hated Reagan and his brand of America-is-not-in-decline hopium appreciated how that decade felt like a breath of fresh air from melancholy weary chaos of the decade before. It was great to be young then, because youth culture was ignored for a season.

Underneath the stability, the Eighties provided the cementing of all the changes that had happened in the Seventies.  Even the "conservative" parts of America embraced many of the radical ideas from the Sixties. The Eighties let these changes gel into the New America that emerged in the Nineties, and that we have lived in since. Our current Woke Era is the tail end of that era playing out. 

President Gerald Ford (right) and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller (center) in the White House with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.