Opinion: Finding I've lived through some amazing history

I just turned 68. Happy birthday to me.

It’s been a long and winding road, one in which I’ve stolen from the Beatles more than once. But, hey, what can I say — I was Born to Run!

Actually, and with apologies to the Boss, I was born to live through some incredible history. From the unraveling of Jim Crow to the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we baby boomers have seen it all.

By the time I got to high school, I was attending an integrated school and getting to know Black people as equals. That may sound quaint today, but back then it was a sea-change in my home state of Arkansas.

As a teenager, I had a paper route when President Nixon began pulling us out of Vietnam — he called it “peace with honor” but reports about the U.S. evacuation suggested otherwise. By the time I turned 18, the draft was still in place but no one was being called up. The fact that I didn’t serve in the military, for better or worse, shaped my future, just as serving shaped others in my generation.

I also remember the headline, “Nixon Resigns,” and not fully grasping the importance of that moment until later. Two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would reshape politics and journalism by uncovering the Watergate scandal. That was a turning point for America, and I watched it unfold while rolling up papers for my early morning paper route.

There’s an old joke — “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there” — which makes light of the drug-induced counterculture at that time (as well as the fact that our world was changing so fast it was hard to keep up). But for me, it was the late ’70s and ’80s, when the so-called “me generation” took full form. I quit school and began to dabble in “peace, love and rock and roll” as Jimmy Carter promised never to lie to us like Nixon had done.

In my young adventures, I began to see and feel the terrible effects of poverty on people, and it radicalized me. As Ronald Reagan moved the nation to the political right, I was moving further left, from helping poor people with direct services to helping to organize them with direct action.

I migrated toward a more centrist political viewpoint when I ventured into journalism. By the time the nation was leaving behind the Bushes for the Clintons, I was helping to write “the first rough draft of history” as a newspaper reporter. As the dotcom boom overtook the 1990s and ushered in a new era, I witnessed the rise of the internet and the decline of newspapers.

Now I wonder what my grandchild will see as she begins her ascent into history. Will humanity self-destruct or will we somehow save ourselves? Will the world grow smaller and more interconnected or larger and more disconnected? I wonder and worry about what’s in store for her.

I’ve lived my history, now she will live hers. She has the advantage of good parents and a loving family, so she’s off to a good start.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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