The Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago this year, from August 19–24. Perhaps you are already bracing yourself, as I am, for an onslaught of pieces looking back at the summer of 1968, when the Democrats held a notoriously contentious gathering in the Windy City, juxtaposing that happening and the state of the nation then with our present in 2024. It comes as a bit of a shock to me to realize how many of those pieces will be written by people who weren’t even born in 1968.
rnConsider the photo (by E. Jason Wambgans) and the accompanying story that appeared “above the fold” (yes, I still read the paper “in print”) on the front page of the Chicago Tribune for Tuesday, May 21. “Campus protests evoke ‘the struggles of the past,’” the headline reads; the photo shows a beatific old couple: “Activists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers smile as they look over the University of Chicago United Students for Palestine encampment on the main quad at the University of Chicago on April 29. Ayers and Dohrn are former Vietnam-era activists who co-founded the Weather Underground.”
