A Time to Laugh, a Time to Weep and Time To Sit Down And Shut Up!

To quote the affable Yogi Berra, the New York Yankee catcher turned linguistical gymnast, "It's deja vu all over again."

The current domestic upheaval in recent weeks replete with the aged Maxine Waters preaching civil unrest, with the reemergence of the proper noun "Fonda" in conjunction with political protest and with the promiscuous use of the word Nazi to describe voters of a particular persuasion hearkens back to the Vietnam War protests. In those days, before toxic masculinity had replaced Bourgeoisie morality as the latent cause of all things immoral and unsightly in the eyes of God and Democrat leadership, supporters of the war were condemned just as today's supporter of border integrity are harangued by the media and the left. Eventually the middle / working class had had enough. It boiled up in lower Manhattan, in the Wall Street district.

On May 8, 1970, one of the strangest confrontations in American post-war history took place when roughly 200 construction workers attacked a thousand demonstrators protesting the Kent State shootings, the invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Seventy people were injured and six arrested in the fracas, which was dubbed the Hard Hat Riot by the media of the day. For a longer exposition on the riot please see this Wikipedia post.

The event was unique. It is remembered almost half a century later not for the injuries, not for the oratory and certainly not as a political happening, It was the day America said ENOUGH. SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP ALREADY. "Wow, it was just like John Wayne taking Iwo Jima remarked Jack Friedman, a 32-year-old insurance underwriter watching the action.1

The riot occurred almost two years after the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon had latched on to the "silent majority" to win the presidency with 301 electoral votes. Hubert Humphrey got 191 and George Wallace took 46. Two years later George Mc Govern lost 49 states to Nixon, winning only Massachusetts. Union leadership stood with the Democratic Party but the rank and file are yet to come home.

Mature democracies got to be mature democracies by demanding domestic tranquility at all costs. Trump's popularity has increased with Democrat outrage simply because the vast majority of Americans are afraid for the nation and are offended  by politicians, a partisan media and a learning impaired academia. It really does not need another Hard Hat Riot but before long it will somehow, tell the left it's time to sit down and shut up.