I Survived the Seventies

For those of you who weren't there, I want to tell you about the most frightening decade of the last century. I am not making these things up, so please bear with me. All of these things happened in the Seventies.

In 1972, the Supreme Court decided that capital punishment was wrong, and outlawed it in every state. They felt that everyone on death row was being deprived of due process by a "cruel and unusual" punishment, and commuted the sentence of everyone on death row in every state that had it.

Less than a year later, by a narrow vote, the same nine men on the same Supreme Court overrode every state law and legalized the termination of the lives of unborn children, and deprived them of their own "due process." Ironically, the amendment they used for this was the 4th Amendment which, ironically, forbids someone from illegally invading someone's home -- someone's "safe place" -- and depriving them of "life, liberty, and property" without due process of law. They read someone else's 4th amendment, I guess, one that says we have a "right to privacy," which means the right to kill a living child in a womb.

In 1972 a president won an election by the largest landslide in history up to that time, and less than a year later, everyone wanted him out, and he became the first president to resign, just 21 months after that landslide vote. His VP had already resigned, and a man became president who had never campaigned or been elected. And he probably did more to save the executive branch than anyone who has ever been elected to it. He even did some things that guaranteed he wouldn't be elected again, so that there could be integrity in the office again some day.

As the 70's began, our nation was fighting a war that congress did not want to win, and drafting teenaged boys to go to the other side of the world to die in the war that congress did not want to win. Those young men went and fought, and if they were lucky enough to return, they were met with insults and rejection when they returned. They were denied care, and made to feel left out. Some of them that decided not to go, and broke the law, were pardoned by a president, but the ones who went were never really "forgiven." A motto for the young men who went was, "We are the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to do the unnecessary, for the ungrateful."