, “Even from the beginning, I didn’t want the film to be about 1968, I wanted it to be about today. None of us realized how much about today it would end up being.”
On January 20, some problems did go away. The biggest problem is that tens of millions of Americans firmly believe things that simply aren’t true and refuse to believe things that are, whether it’s the winner of an election or whether there is a deadly virus going around. Other problems like systemic racism didn’t go away on January 20. This is a country founded on protest — and for the following 250 years or so, every important change was preceded by civil protest.
That’s right, and it shocked Kunstler. It was a five-and-a-half-month trial, so we couldn’t cover everything in the film. But Kunstler became undone during this trial for exactly that reason. He thought juries may get it wrong from time to time, but in a courtroom — with equality, justice, the rules and the protections — things work the way they’re supposed to. But they didn’t in this courtroom, at all.
During the Chicago 1968 convention, my grandparents blamed protesters for the violence and applauded the Chicago cops.