Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due in the spring. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

A new year provides the chance for a clean slate, and perhaps this time we’ll get one. Not that this is what we’re being told, daily and practically hourly: Our problems are intractable and unsolvable. This is a divided nation that can’t seem to agree even on a set of common facts. We must turn the future over to the gods of technology, the only force that seems inevitable and irresistible.

I beg to differ.

From the period I’ve been researching, 1968 seems a moment very much like our own, a year that for my generation became formative, for good and ill.

On the surface, there seem few similarities. Yet underneath, there was a crisis of confidence that shattered trust not only in government but in many of our institutions.

The realization that Vietnam was not a defense of freedom but had become an unwinnable neocolonial project turned countless young Americans of draft age against “the system” they believed had betrayed them. The shattered hopes represented by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy deepened the sense of despair.

Why the United States, under four administrations, both Democratic and Republican, would choose to risk its claim to world leadership based on principle, not just power, is a question historians still haven’t been able to satisfactorily answer, though not for lack of trying.

Yet 1968 and the era it represents was also a spur to social movements so broad and so powerful that we are still trying to sort them out, resolving their inherent conflicts and untangling strands that detract from their aims.

When we despair of our present choices, we must think harder about an America within memory of many still alive. It was a place where most Black people couldn’t vote, a place where women were largely denied entry to professions of the church, law, medicine and higher education. A place where those whose sexual orientations differed from the majority kept them well hidden. A place where rivers and streams were so polluted they stank and burned, and supposedly nothing could be done about it.

One hesitates to use the word “progress,” but a world where those things are no longer true is a better world.

Yes, national politics since then can seem like one great oscillation between the two major parties, once an eight-year cycle, more recently four. But if we look a little nearer at hand, we can see that Maine on the whole has certainly progressed. It is a far more prosperous place, one that has more capable state and local governments, responsive to public needs that hadn’t even been articulated before the 1960s.

If you’re seeking an education or an interesting job, there is far more opportunity than there was back then. Maine is also a cleaner and safer state, something we too rarely appreciate.

Maine also sent a whole generation of notable leaders to Washington who made a difference both in concrete achievements and in moral leadership. Maine was for a time on the map, as we used to say.

The difficult part of history is that periods of progress are followed by years of stagnation, then drift. Institutions must be renewed and refreshed or they too no longer accomplish the purposes for which they were designed.

The coming year feels a lot like that. Young people, even more than most, wonder why we have a financial and political system that may soon produce trillionaires, while being unable to explain why we have so many homeless people, let alone overcome the crisis.

They wonder why social media has become such a wasteland, diverting time, attention and dollars from things that have always mattered much more, even as traditional resources of community, family, friendship and communication shrivel under the strain.

And they wonder, perhaps most of all, why the election cycle leads only to another election in a seemingly endless pattern, rather than producing the laws and the programs that would actually meet public needs, rather than the preferences of one faction or another.

Discontent is the beginning of change, and there’s plenty to be discontented about. Those coming of voting age rightly wonder why their prospects seem dimmer than those of their parents, and even of their grandparents, why this powerful and prosperous society should offer so little for them.

Change cannot be predicted, but it can be sensed and responded to — the ways all movements grow. We’ll know soon enough whether the young will confound their elders, and decide whether this will truly be a new year.