Watching it Unravel

A comparison of drivers behind the recent and current phenomenon of social unrest.

Anyone who has studied history at all knows there have been a multitude of social unrest events in the past. Depending on how far back one goes determines the motive, or driver, behind them, and for a variety of reasons.

Those of us who were alive in the decade of the 1960s, or weren’t living under a rock during those years,

remembers the social unrest known as the “cultural revolution” and “hippie summer of love” which swept the nation. Tune in, drop out, turn on! This is a counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966. In 1967, Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and used the famous words, "Turn on, tune in, drop out”.

More recently during the COVID – 19 pandemic years, we experienced the nationwide unrest in the summer of 2020, but for a very different reason.

While motivated by two very different drivers, each period of unrest has commonalities as well.

The 1960s unrest – assassination of a president, his brother who was a candidate for the presidency, a minister who created a civil rights movement, and a war on the other side of the world that seemed to drag on and took many sons from us – were the issues which motivated that period of social unrest.

The 2020 pandemic’s unrest – a cell phone video showcased a black man who appeared to have been snuffed out by a cop was the match that ignited the social flames when news coverage exposed it to tens of millions – exposed the hypocrisy of the expectations for containing the virus’s spread among the masses when marching in the streets for Black Lives Matter. But when it came to their “mostly peaceful protesting,” masks and not gathering in crowds were of no concern.