"Fifty years later, what are the lessons of the chaotic year 1969 for our similarly schizophrenic age of polarization, civil disunity, and unprecedented wealth and scientific advancement?"

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes that 50 years ago

Newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon characterized the national divide as the “silent majority” of traditional Americans fighting back against radical changes in culture and politics.

Under the strain of constant protests, the cultural and moral fabric of the country seemed to be tearing apart.

...In July 1969, liberal icon Teddy Kennedy ran his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, and his young passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was left to drown. Senator Kennedy did not report the accident to authorities until 10 hours later.

The next month, members of hippie psychopath Charles Manson’s “family” butchered seven innocents in Los Angeles, among them actress Sharon Tate. The Manson family apparently had hoped that the sensationalized murders would ignite some sort of racial civil war, thereby unraveling the United States.

Yet a wounded United States did not just survive 1969, but reached new heights of scientific, technological and cultural achievement.

For the first time in history, a national economy produced more than $1 trillion worth of goods and services in a single year, as American nominal GDP for 1969 exceeded that level.

America also put the first humans on the moon in 1969—and did it twice the same year, with the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 lunar missions.

...Fifty years later, what are the lessons of the chaotic year 1969 for our similarly schizophrenic age of polarization, civil disunity, and unprecedented wealth and scientific advancement?

America is such a huge and diverse country, and so abundantly endowed with natural and human resources, that it is capable of achieving unprecedented scientific, economic and technological breakthroughs even as its social fabric is tearing apart.

Or, put another way, while the media highlights crime, protests, grievances, and civil disorder, a majority of Americans still go to work unbothered each day.

And in a rare society with a free market, constitutional government and individual freedom, people continue to do amazing things even amid the utter chaos around them.

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