There is in this land a certain restlessness, a questioning,” said President Lyndon Johnson when he delivered his State of the Union message at the beginning of 1968. How right he was. And to his own question of “why, why this restlessness?” he responded: “Because when a great ship cuts through the seas, the waters are stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving….“

What Lyndon Johnson overlooked in his neat metaphor was that a lot of passengers on that ship were stirred and troubled, fearing that they were on a new Titanic setting due course for a large iceberg that was highly visible to them but apparently not to Captain Johnson and his crew.