For many, the year-end holidays are an intriguing juxtaposition of seeming contradictions: favored memories resurface, even as we create new ones in the current moment; we hear voices of the past and simultaneously rejoice in the smiles of today’s youth, and fellowship of family and friends.
This season reminds us that, as much as things seem new, as strongly as we believe this age is freighted with issues humankind has never before faced, that the truth and old reality still hold much water. As in there really is nothing new under the sun.
That is a message well worth remembering in this tumultuous present. It applies equally as well to a near future that shows no hopeful sign of being any less turbulent and freighted with risk than today.
We’ve been there before. We survived then. We can do it again. Repeat that thought until it fully, finally sinks in.
A trip through the initial rough draft of history that are the pages of this newspaper from half a century ago shows the shocking tenacity of the big issues that vexed past generations and, albeit in updated form, continue to do so today.
In 1966, American troops were on war footing as combat took no holiday in Southeast Asia. Politicians of the day warned of the potential spread of hostilities throughout a troubled, foreign region. The front page of The Atlanta Constitution reported on U.S. shipments of arms to Jordan. The passage of 50 years hasn’t lessened the volatility of the Middle East, it seems.
Here at home, the plight of an 11-year-old shoplifting suspect who faced spending Christmas in a Thomasville jail made the Constitution’s front page for two days’ running, ending with the lad being put on a bus for Florida to spend Christmas with his grandmother after all. Criminal justice reform, 1966-style.
An editorial two days before Christmas then wrote ominously of the U.S.-Russia arms race. “It therefore appears senseless — even bordering on piling insanity on top of insanity — for the United States and the Soviet Union to get into a costly anti-missile system contest.” Substitute “missile” for “hacking” and the struggle hasn’t changed much across the decades.
Yet, even in the midst of suffering, conflict and chaos, Atlantans and the rest of America nevertheless found reason for hope and optimism — fueled by a healthy dose of holiday spirit.
We can learn from that, especially since we know that the world’s lurched along somehow since then.
