I’m sitting here looking at a stack of dates and they don’t exactly form a neat line. It’s like—I don’t know—a messy ledger of things that just kept happening. Take 1989. Alice Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, hits and kills Oleta Hardin in Arkansas. She’s behind the wheel of a Porsche, speeding toward her bank, and suddenly a 50-year-old cannery worker is gone. No charges followed. It feels heavy, the kind of silence that settles in after a car door slams shut—the air is still, yet everything has shifted.
Then you trace back further. 1953, the CIA is busy under Allen Dulles. They’re deciding to overthrow Iran’s elected government while simultaneously dumping resources into mind control research. It’s a strange juxtaposition, isn’t it? Or maybe just standard operating procedure for that era. Then there’s 1949, the year NATO forms to stare down the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, yet here we are, and the alliance persists. History doesn’t always clean up after itself.
Some moments are just jarring, like the 1975 crash of a C-5A flight during Operation Babylift. It went down into a rice paddy near Tan Son Nhut, killing 154 people, including 78 children. You read that and you want to stop, but the calendar keeps ticking. 1970 sees 50,000 people on the National Mall marching for a ‘Victory’ that wasn’t coming, protesting the Vietnamization of a war that was already tearing the country apart.
There’s a weird rhythm to it all. 1968, MLK is killed in Memphis—James Earl Ray, maybe, or maybe people we still don’t know anything about. A year earlier, in 1967, King denounces the Vietnam War, calling for a merger of civil rights and anti-war efforts. The backlash was immediate; 168 newspapers turned on him instantly. It makes you wonder how quickly the narrative shifts. Actually, wait—was it 168? Yes, that’s the figure Misryoum cites. It’s a lot of ink spent on silencing a voice.
And then there’s the ‘Third Wave’ experiment in Palo Alto in 1967. Robert Jones’ students start doing these cross-chest salutes and building a movement. It’s small, but it’s a symptom. It’s strange how fast things can take root, isn’t it? Like how in 1877, a house in Somerville, Massachusetts, got the first home telephone. That tech changed everything, though it feels like a different lifetime compared to the cold logic of Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal in 1984, where he swapped arms for funding after Congress cut the purse strings.
It’s a lot to process. The past is just a pile of these moments, and they don’t always fit together.