Today's News Is 'Deja Vu All Over Again' For Those Over 50

It’s been said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Maybe that’s why some of us are experiencing a sense of deja vu caused by recent news events. Shades of crouching along the school hallway during air raid drills when we thought Cuba was going to launch missiles our way!

1. We are in a war and don’t know why.

How do you process terrorist attacks that wipe out innocents for a cause that you barely begin to understand? We are at war. If that wasn’t clear to you before the truck rolled through the Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France, ending another 85+ lives, it should have been. Add Nice to the list that includes New York City, Istanbul, Paris, Orlando, Pakistan, India, Belgium, Iraq, and San Bernardino. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few dozen places.

Shades of Vietnam: Dying in the name of someone else’s cause.

2. Canada looked good then and it looks good now.

In the 1960s, young draftees fled across our northern border to elude military duty. Pacifists, protesters, cowards. We all saw them differently; truly, who they were lived in the eye of the beholder. But Canada ― our continent’s true Switzerland of neutrality ― stayed calm. Canada ― a kinder, gentler America ― never gets its britches tied up in knots the way we do.

Who remembers hitchhiking through Europe after college with a Canadian flag sewn on their backpack? Europeans would always stop for “Canadians;” not so for Americans. Today, nobody stops for anybody and everybody wishes Justin Trudeau could be our president.

3. Riots solve little but instill tremendous fear in white America.

The riots of 1967 in 100 cities left stores looted, neighborhoods burned out, put National Guardsmen on every urban street corner in America, and spurred white flight like nobody’s business. And now, decades later, we are still having a conversation about whether black lives matter.

4. Police aren’t above the law, but sometimes they act like they are.

In the 1960s, my long-haired hippie boyfriend and I were regularly stopped by police for broken tail-lights. Or the patrol officer would knock on the windows of our VW camper as we slept in it. We called them “pigs.” Today they are called much worse and in a depressing act of insanity, somebody just killed five of them in Dallas. How is that any better and how does that get us any closer to resolution?

Give some men guns and power and they begin to believe they are above the law. They weren’t then and they aren’t now. And nor are we.

5. Politics have seemingly gone insane.

The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was held during a year of violence, political turbulence, and civil unrest. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4 and Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5.

The convention itself was marked with massive protests and arrests. The world, it seemed, had simply gone mad and instead of political leadership, we had Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. Putting your head in your hands and sobbing could have been an early internet meme.

6. The world doesn’t feel safe.

The world feels more unsafe now, but it felt plenty dangerous then as well. Instead of fearing every Muslim and Middle Easterner, in the 1960s and 1970s we brought our irrational fears to serial killers. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Henry Lee Lucas were household names. Serial killings account for no more than 1 percent of all murders committed in the U.S., according to the FBI ― which estimates that there are between 25 and 50 serial killers operating throughout the U.S. at any given time. But from our behavior, you would think they all lived on our street.

Just as we are adjusting our lives now because of the fear of gun violence and acts of terrorism, we adjusted our lives then: We quit necking in the car so that we wouldn’t become Son of Sam’s next victim, much the same as we obligingly take off our shoes in the TSA screening line. It makes us feel safer, however absurd the odds of it actually doing something to effectively spare our lives.