The lousy reason I didn't vote in 1968 — and why Sanders supporters shouldn't fall for it

[DonViejo]

I thought there was no difference between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. I was wrong.

Updated by Michael Ansara Sep 21, 2016, 8:00am

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Why we thought it didn’t matter if Nixon or Humphrey won


As America lurches toward Election Day, it is clear that this will be a very close election. Humphrey has the entire Democratic establishment desperately working as hard as they can. They will not be enough in what will turn out to be an election decided by less than a percentage point.

Those of us in the student antiwar movement see Humphrey as profoundly corrupt, profoundly tainted by his support for the war. We hate Nixon, but in truth we have not experienced what a right-wing government can do. We have come of age and to activism in the years since 1960 — so we only know Kennedy and Johnson as presidents, we have only experienced a liberal domination of national politics, and, more often than not, the policies we are protesting are the policies of liberal Democrats. In the fall of 1968, we experience a great failure of political imagination.

WE DO NOT SEE WHAT IS COMING — AT HOME AS WELL AS INTERNATIONALLY


We think it doesn’t matter if Nixon or Humphrey wins. We think the war will keep going the same no matter who wins. We cannot imagine that it will expand, that there will be a simultaneous policy of "Vietnamization," so that the American body count decreases, and escalation that will claim another million more Asian lives. We cannot imagine the disaster that will befall Cambodia because of Nixon and Kissinger and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. We do not see what is coming — at home as well as internationally.

We do not understand that soon Nixon will invite to the White House and celebrate the leaders of building trades unions who led violent attacks on antiwar protesters in New York. We think the well of black sadness cannot get any deeper. We are wrong. We cannot imagine what will be unleashed against black leaders and the black community. We do not imagine that the FBI and Chicago police will shoot and kill Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as he sleeps in his bed, possibly drugged.

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http://www.vox.com/2016/9/21/12987108/sanders-clinton-nixon-humphrey