‘The whole world is watching’

BEATEN and arrested by police in Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching.”

The event was, indeed, covered by the major television networks and broadcast nationally and internationally, as the protestors were being whacked and pulled into police vans, and the spontaneous and perceptive chants became famous worldwide.

The phrase is still regularly used in protests, but its significance goes beyond that. It conveys the sense that in our contemporary global village, what happens in America, including when it comes to its politics, does not stay in America.