It is tempting to find reassurance in the comparison: America survived the turmoil, division and bloodshed of 1968. I find no basis for such solace
During the turbulent year in 1968, when I achieved Jewish manhood as a barmitzvah, I took on a more concrete form of maturity with a job delivering newspapers. Making the rounds of my New Jersey hometown, tossing copies of the Daily Home News onto 70-odd porches, I almost literally trafficked in the tragedies captured in each banner headline.
My mother was doing the favor of driving me along my route on the rainy April night when we heard the radio bulletin of Martin Luther King’s assassination. On the June afternoon after Robert F Kennedy was slain, one of my customers asked me how the paper could even be published. Several days later, Kennedy’s funeral train rolled along the Penn Central tracks right through my hometown of Highland Park.
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