"They were burning down the Bank of America the other day,
on the kitchen colour television,
while I spooned fortified cereal into the Future's mouth.
He sat high and handsome in his germ-free plastic chair,
(a whirr of artificial air above)..."

The above is the beginning of a poem written forty-three years ago by Joy Eaton Loth. Richard Nixon was president then, America was engaged in a war in Vietnam and the Black Panther Party was seven-years-old.

When the poem was written, six years had passed since Martin Luther King was assassinated. Following his death, riots had rocked 100 cities including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark and Washington, DC. Five years had gone by since two African-American athletes thrust their fists into the air in a Black Power salute as the American anthem played at the Olympics in Mexico City.

Today, forty-three years later, an African-American  is president. The wrongs of slavery, segregation and discrimination have been corrected and should have healed, but have not which makes one wonder if they ever can be. America is engaged in a different war, this one with Radical Islam (although the Obama Administration will not acknowledge it). And two days ago a sniper assassinated six police officers in Dallas, Texas, in retaliation for a policeman having shot to death an African-American in Minnesota. The assassin's Facebook profile photo shows him wearing a purple, yellow and gold dashiki with his fist thrust into the air in the same Black Power salute as the athletes in Mexico City forty-eight years ago. His page also shows the red, black and green striped flag of the Black Panthers (1).

Nearly a half a century has gone by, but it seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"'They burned down the Bank of America today,' the Future's Father said,
arriving tired from the office bearing the paper load of his work,
wearing his childhood in the Japanese prison camp on his forehead, and, the manual labor which put him through college on his hands..."

The boring 1950's were as staid and steady as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, yet "The Postwar Years", as they sometimes are called, brought unprecedented prosperity to the American Middle Class who, now that they could afford an automobile, fled the dangerous concrete canyons of the cities for the promise of a small, green patch of Eden in the suburbs. But not everyone was able to escape the cities, and the prosperity of the 1950's did not extend to African-Americans who remained locked in segregation and discrimination.

The 1960's arrived with the promise of hope and change in the person of handsome, charismatic, John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately President Kennedy was assassinated in the same Dallas, Texas, where six police officers now lay dead with seven of their fellows also injured. Thus, as Dwight D. Eisenhower remains the face of the 1950's and Barack Obama will be the face of this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, Lyndon Baines Johnson became the face of a decade now known for its turbulence and violence.

President Johnson's final year in office is oddly reminiscent of the one President Obama is enduring. In January of 1968, North Korea captured the American Naval vessel, Pueblo, in International waters. Forty-eight years later, in the same month, Iran captured two Navy riverine command boats in which both sides admit were in Iranian waters. Just as the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive rocked Americans' confidence in Johnson's leadership, so attacks by terrorists in San Bernadino and Orlando has rocked many Americans' confidence in President Obama's ability to protect the nation. The New Hampshire primary of 1968 shocked the Democrat establishment when disaffected youths upset President Johnson by delivering victory to Eugene McCarthy just as New Hampshire shocked Hillary Clinton by delivering victory to Socialist Independent, Bernie Sanders. What's more concerning, however, is that 1968 is remembered not only for the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, but for the violence that erupted in in America's cities and at the Democrat National Convention. Anti-democratic hordes are threatening to do the same to both the Democrat and the Republican conventions this year.

"The Bank of America with a few feeble flames flickering,
was featured on next morning's news.
The Future was seated on my lap at the breakfast table,
learning to pick up Cheerios for his new teeth to chomp,
(The voice of the eloquent and elated reporter above).

The glib and garrulous students in their expensive
 Mod tennis shoes,
 fresh-torn shirts,
 and permanently pressed jeans,
  were now ranting residuals,
  pouting 'gimme, gimme',
  flipping the finger,
  to themselves,
  (Caged within their clothes).

I watched them writhing for awhile,
and feeling faintly sad,
pitied their affluent poverty...
(a kind of inverse avarice?)
Their desires from birth delivered,
by a doting Mom or Dad,
packaged in plastic, gratis.
(unpayable debts are bad)...

I could no longer bear to see their
charred, ruined, reeling bodies, ANYMORE.
And so,
I turned them off...

Rome fell by such as these,
My blue-eyed baby boy,
Barbarians not taught to build,
Know only to destroy..."

The above excerpts are from a poem written by Joy Eaton Loth, Houston, Texas, in 1973, which Growltiger considers perhaps the best poem she has ever read. Poem used with permission of Ms. Loth.
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(1) Facebook Profile
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-dallas-police-shooting-live-suspect-joined-facebook-groups-that-1468001887-htmlstory.html

(2) http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-pueblo-captured

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_incident
 

(4) http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html