Mike Berry column: Today’s news: Deja vu all over again

Runaway inflation.

A scandal involving the president that seems to threaten the very future of our democracy.

The Russians trying to take over a neighboring country that really doesn’t want to be taken over, and the United States helping that neighboring country fight off the invading Russians.

That’s not the second decade of the Twenty-first Century I’m describing. It’s the 1970s.

Except that there was no infectious disease wiping out millions of people around the globe, all of those events that seem so much like what’s happening today took place in the Seventies.

It began at about the same time I started at the Star Courier, June of 1972, when some burglars were caught breaking into a Democratic Party office in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

As everyone knows, that incident led to a series of scandals lumped together under the name Watergate. The scandal culminated in August 1974 with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Nixon was about to be impeached, and judging by the number of Republicans who had condemned his behavior, he doubtless would have been the only U.S. president who was removed from office through impeachment.

The inflation began in the early 1970s with what was titled the Arab Oil Embargo (although it actually involved the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, which included non-Arab nations like Venezuela and Russia).

Almost overnight, gasoline went from about a quarter a gallon to more than a dollar. Cutbacks by OPEC on oil production led to shortages that led to long lines at filling stations of motorists who would pay several times more for their fillup than they had before.

Since practically everything we buy has to be delivered somewhere by truck, the high cost of gas spread to practically everything else we needed.

Inflation was still enough of an issue by the end of the decade that President Jimmy

Carter lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. (The Iran hostage crisis, another major news event of the 70s that, fortunately, hasn’t been repeated, was another factor working against Carter.)

The nation invaded by Russia (it was the Soviet Union then, of course) was Afghanistan. There was a guerrilla group calling itself the mujahideen who were fighting the Russians; the U.S. called these people freedom fighters and supplied them with Stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet planes.

The Soviet leaders finally wised up and gave up their attempt to take over Afghanistan. The mujahideen morphed into the Taliban and fought U.S. troops for 20 years before we withdrew last year.

The one regrettable piece of history from the 1970s that hasn’t repeated itself these days is disco, a form of music that I deplored at the time and still haven’t developed a tolerance for.

While people today still listen to the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones and other 1960s groups, I don’t hear much by K.C. and the Sunshine Band on the radio these days.

So the parallels between the 70s and now aren’t complete — although misbehaving presidents and Russians and soaring gas prices are still a recurring nightmare.

This article originally appeared on Star Courier: Mike Berry : Today’s news, Deja vu all over again