I was sitting down between bowl games Monday and doing something a man isn’t supposed to do — thinking — and I realize I’m reaching a few milestones this year.

Actually, 2018 is the milestone for several major events in American history, but I’ll get to that in a bit. I’m going to be self-centered for a while.

This year will have been 50 years since I graduated from high school as one of a rather large graduating class at what was then Robert E. Lee High School in Baton Rouge. In the time that has passed, my sister and brother both graduated from Lee, and the school was demolished and rebuilt as a magnet school.

Fifty years ago in May, I won the city and Louisiana District 3 AAA titles in the low hurdles, an event that is no longer run. Neither do I, thanks to the consequences of a much often injured right ankle, which I broke in 2014. Fifty years ago, I was built for speed; now I’m built for comfort.

In September of 1968, I met my wife in a college English class; the rest is history.

Now for some history.

A couple of weeks from now marks the 50th anniversary of the Tet offensive — a series of concerted attacks by North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas that went a long way to start changing many Americans’ opinions on the Vietnam War and about the war news they were receiving from the military and the government.

Also 50 years ago the right wing of the Republican Party found a consensus candidate in former Vice President Richard Nixon and got him elected president. Six years later, Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal.

The past 50 years have seen a lot history — the country’s longest war, a president who was involved in the cover-up of a crime and who sanctioned dirty tricks and questionable activities against his political enemies and the media, and another president get impeached but found not guilty of charges at a Senate trial. And improvements in civil rights and integration.

And what will the next 50 years bring?

Once again, the right wing of the Republican Party has gotten a candidate elected, and this new darling of the right is slowly turning out to be the biggest joke ever played on the American people.

In some ways, Donald Trump has been compared to Richard Nixon, and in his paranoia about the media and his enemies he is like Nixon. But Nixon also signed the first comprehensive environmental laws in the U.S. He opened the door to China, he ended the war in Vietnam, signed a nuclear arms treaty and he worked with our allies. He didn’t insult them.

In my life, which I hope lasts a long time, I’ve seen a lot of history and I expect to see more before I reach a deadline I can live with. My hope is that the next 50 years includes change for the better.

John Surratt is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com