I was 15 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed.
All in all, 1968 was quite the year. The assassinations of King and of Robert F. Kennedy (Sr.), race riots all over the country, the horrors of the Vietnam War, the capture by North Korea of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the Prague Spring and the subsequent crushing of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, madness on college campuses here and in Europe, the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On the plus side, NASA's Apollo program was going strong, and the Apollo 8 mission gave mankind its first look at the far side of the moon.
I was privileged at that time to be in the class of Jim Balk, the best history teacher I ever had, and so was primed to be more aware of what was going on than usual.
Personally, 1968 was also the year of our family's world-expanding cross-country automobile trip. My father had grown up in the State of Washington, but we children had never been further west than Central Florida. Granted, it would have been even more eye-opening for me had I had not spent so much of our travel time with my eyes glued to Robert Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow and other books we'd picked up from my uncle as we travelled through Ohio. I am not proud of the fact that science fiction could hold my interest far longer than the amber waves of grain or the purple mountain majesties. Nonetheless, it was an amazing and important experience, as would be my first trip to Europe the following year.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the midpoint of a dark, tumultuous, and very strange time for our country. It was followed by a few decades of apparent recovery, but looking back I wonder if we were merely in the calmer eye of the hurricane. For several years now it has felt to me as if the winds of the 1960's have returned with surpassing strength.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk took me right back to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I learned from Mr. Balk that in that event, the Civil Rights Movement lost its best hope for non-violent progress, and he was proved right. King's non-violent legacy was "honored" by rage and riots.
Charlie Kirk believed strongly that we need to keep talking with each other, that when we stop talking, violence rushes in to fill the gap. That's why he loved going to college campuses and giving students an open mike to debate with him.
Shock and grief naturally lead to anger, but we need to get through that stage quickly, learn the lessons of 1968, and choose to honor Charlie Kirk by keeping hold of the values by which he lived and worked.
