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To hear David Gergen tell it,Watch The Art of Anal Sex 13 Online the turbulent history of America's 1960s protest movement was little more than a polite disagreement between old pals.

"The anti-war movement in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 70s, both of these were more civil in tone" than the pro- and anti-Trump forces in 2018, Gergen, a Republican adviser to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush claimed on CNN Monday night.

The political analyst was rightly dragged on Twitter -- and even found himself subtweeted by a CNN anchor, who posted bloody images from the Civil Rights struggle. (Emphasis on "struggle.") Gergen, who was in his 20s and interning for a (pro-civil rights) southern governor in the early 1960s, has zero excuse.

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His words may be hyperbole. They're part of the GOP's attempt du jourto stoke a "civility" controversy over a Virginia restaurant owner politely informing the truth-challenged Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders that she was not welcome in his establishment.

But they're also indicative of a troubling trend: the 1960s is slowly being whitewashed, the "civil" in civil rights commonly misunderstood, and the decade's true spirit is fading before our eyes.

It's not just that too many politicians and pundits routinely misunderstand the meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. every MLK Day. (Memo to everyone: If you want to understand the man, make sure you've read and re-read King's Letter from a Birmingham Jailon the unsurpassed danger of quiet, polite moderation, and the necessity of "extremism" in the face of "unjust laws.")

The fierce urgency of now: MLK  full of righteous fury at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally in July 1966 . Credit: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

It's also a misperception that the antiwar protest movement, the one that eventually ground down the gears of Vietnam after a decade of marches, was all hippy-dippy peace and love. It wasn't. It was loud. It was angry. It was aggressively un-"civil" in the Gergen sense of the word.

Some protesters stuck daisies in National Guard gun barrels. Many more yelled in their faces. Plenty were tear-gassed or beaten for their troubles. An unbearable number were killed.

In your face: An injured man has his eyes bandaged after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968. Credit: Miriam Bokser/Villon Films/Getty Images

In 1968, when John Lennon sang "when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you could count me out ... in," on "Revolution", he reflected the ambivalence of a generation. His peers had seen political heroes (King and two Kennedys) gunned down and argued constantly about the right way to fight back against their conservative elders. The more civil the protest, millions began to feel, the less effective.

This was a generation that had lost patience with patience. One of its most influential anti-war groups, one that influenced both the whimsical Yippies and (unfortunately) the ultra-violent Weathermen, was literally called Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.

How's thatfor civility?

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Unafraid to call bullshit: Students protesting the trumped-up trial of seven Chicago protesters in 1969. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The sad legacy of the 1960s was how many of those extremists eventually shaded into domestic terrorism. (They were a tiny minority of the whole, but even one was too many.) Even if the Weathermen did give warnings that cleared corporate buildings before their homemade bombs went off, acts of outright violence were unquestionably evil and ultimately counterproductive.

History has not been kind to them. And there's no question that the millennial generation in its 20s and 30s is more inherently peaceful than its Boomer predecessor at the same age. Last year, Charlottesville saw widespread resistance mounted to a fascist white nationalist rally -- but this was a reactive, rather than proactive protest.

Even the relatively contentious anti-police protests in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and again in November, probably the nearest thing this decade has seen to a 1960s-style proactive protest, saw injuries in the dozens. Compare that to the 750 injuries during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

When you talk about destruction, comparatively, you can count Generation 2018 out.

A Weathermen-led protest, "Days of Rage," in 1969. The plinth in the background contained a police statue that was blown up by the Weathermen. Twice. Credit: david fenton/Getty Images

But when you talk about nonviolent resistance, it's important to remember what that involved as far as the 20th century was concerned. It didn't adhere to any abstract notions of civility. It was loud, it was unapologetically angry, it stood its ground, and it was very often illegal.

In 1930, Mahatma Ghandi led a march to the sea to make salt -- probably the most famous act of nonviolence in history. It's easy to forget he was deliberately breaking a British law on salt imports, for all the world to see.

Same thing with the most famous anti-war act of the 1960s, the burning of draft cards. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a law that made draft-card burning illegal. In 1968, the Supreme Court rejected arguments that this law was against the First Amendment. (See, 2018 does not have a monopoly on dumb Supreme Court decisions either.)

People went ahead and burned their draft cards anyway.

Antiwar demonstrators burn their draft cards on the steps of the Pentagon. Credit: hulton archive/Getty Images

A time traveler hopping forward in time 50 years from 1968 to 2018 would be stunned to see how peaceful things are, especially if she heard pundits like Gergen complain about incivility. Though the American president has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents -- perhaps, some advocates worry, permanently -- and is talking openly of denying due process, amazingly, there's not a single overturned car to be seen in American streets this year. (With the possible exception of major sporting events.)

National Guard troops and  an overturned car during anti-Vietnam protests in Washington, 1969. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Even the most utterly nonviolent act of civil disobedience, the sit-in, seems to have vanished from the scene. First used to protest segregated restaurants in the South, the tactic soon spread to universities. Students drew attention to their causes by taking over buildings.

Trump-era students may be woke, but direct action of this kind doesn't appear to be on their radar. The closest thing is probably the die-in, a tactic that became particularly popular and poignant in the wake of the shooting of students in Parkland, Florida.

Parkland's savvy protesters understand how to fight a media war -- but at the same time, die-ins don't exactly disrupt anyone's day. (A planned die-in at Disney World in Florida, to protest Disney's support for a pro-NRA Congressman, was canceled Tuesday.)

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Whether you agree with or disapprove of the 1960s flavor of nonviolent resistance, the simple historical truth of the matter is that America is nowhere near the boiling point of a half-century ago.

Or that the concept of getting angry just for the sake of it -- "I don't know what to do, but first you've got to get mad!" as fictional newscaster Howard Beale urged his viewers in Network-- seems absolutely alien to us now.

Whenever you hear the GOP complain about incivility, then, remember this: on the scale of recent American history, having harsh words with a cabinet member in a restaurant or taking a knee on a football field is barely a blip.

Chicago, 1968: An unknown protester outside the Democratic Convention is led away by police. Credit: LEe balterman/ LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

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