As an elementary school kid I read Mad Magazine. By junior high I had graduated to the National Lampoon, but Mad still held a place in my juvenile heart. One of the spoofs I remember was a Star Trek parody where the Enterprise was forced back in time to a date that filled Captain Kirk with hysterical fear: 1968.
Now granted, there were bright spots that year. Two stand out. The first was a frolic of the Chicago Police, as they had some serious baton practice on the deserving noggins of left wing miscreants. The second was Apollo 8. There was another event. The presidential election.
As Mad spoofed, the country was indeed in turmoil and part of the problem was violence. Like now, we worried about crime and murder. The successful Republican presidential candidate of 1968, Richard Nixon, knew this. His campaign produced the spot below.
Notice the ending, “This Time Vote Like Your Whole World Depended On It.” Voters reacted well to Nixon’s voting advice and he was elected. But there was still a crime increase. In fact, between 1965 and 1974 the murder number doubled from below 10,000 to over 20,000. Then after years of lower murder numbers, we’re headed back today to a similar number to 1974.
FNC: “The 2021 United States murder rate is estimated to be nearly as high as it was in 25 years ago, when more than 19,600 people were killed nationwide, according to statistics shared in a recent report. The murder rate was estimated to be 6.9 murders per 100,000 people in 2021 – just 0.5 lower than the 1996 murder rate of 7.4, according to FBI data examined by data analyst Jeff Asher and shared by the New York Times. It’s the closest the nation has come to the high-crime scourge of the early 90s. The FBI estimated that 19,645 people were murdered in 1996. Meanwhile, 2021 ended with several cities – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, to name a few – reporting upticks in murders.”
The murder of 14,000 Americans in 1968 was seen as horrendous and that concern was reflected in the public consciousness. Many knew then, as we do today, that their whole world; their homes, their families, their neighborhoods, and their cities were out of control, in the grip of thugs and non-caring municipal administrations. In 2022 our federal government and media do not want to deal with the numbers above because the party in power in DC runs almost all of the cities where law and order has broken down.
But the whole worlds of Democrat politicians, protected by fences and barricades, by armed private and government security, do not depend on decreasing crime. What happens to them does not happen to you. Think about that when you go to the polls in November. Think about it now more than ever. And then, in this case, take Richard Nixon’s advice.