History doesn’t really move in a straight line. I’m sitting here with the smell of stale coffee—burnt, honestly—and looking at the calendar for April 4th. It’s strange how many jagged, heavy things seem to pile up on one date. It’s just data, but it feels like a weight.
Take 1989. Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress, is speeding to her bank. She hits Oleta Hardin, a cannery worker. Oleta dies. No charges. It just stops there, or maybe it doesn’t. Then you look back further to 1968, Memphis. Martin Luther King, Jr. is murdered. James Earl Ray gets the blame, sure, but there’s always that lingering sense of—well, of other hands involved. A year before that, King had denounced the Vietnam War, and the press—168 newspapers—turned on him. The irony of that is thick enough to choke on.
Then there’s the sheer scale of the mess. 1953: The CIA decides, why not knock over Iran’s government? And while we’re at it, let’s study mind control. 1949: NATO forms to fight the U.S.S.R. The Soviets have been gone since ’91, but NATO is still here. It’s like a habit we forgot how to break.
I keep thinking about 1975. Operation Babylift. A C-5A flight crashes into a rice paddy. 154 people dead. 78 kids. Just kids. It makes the ’70 March for Victory on the Mall, with 50,000 people shouting about the Vietnam War, feel like a different planet entirely. Actually, not a different planet. Just a louder one.
1877. The first home telephone in Somerville, Mass. The world got smaller. The world got louder.
And let’s not forget 1967. Palo Alto. Robert Jones’ students start ‘The Third Wave’ movement, using a salute that feels too close to home. It’s all just layers. You start looking for a pattern, but you just find more questions about what we’re doing and why we keep repeating—or maybe just forgetting—these moments. The list just trails off, doesn’t it?