November 22, 1963/2013

It has been fifty years since the Kennedy assassination and the true beginning of the “sixties.” On that November 22, in 1963, we who were very young, and living a relatively slow paced, black and white, half hour of news at seven existence, were slammed into a world of real time murder, distrust, intrigue, and confusion. I can still see Sister Benedict dropping to her knees in our classroom gripping her cross and telling us all to kneel down right now and say a prayer for the president, who might in fact be dying. I ran the six blocks home to my mother who uncharacteristically hadn’t heard what had happened.  I remember trying to sort out the reality of it all. He was actually dead? Shot in the head? There was Jackie with blood all over her, people running around with guns, police cars, Air Force One, a casket, darkness, lights, he was dead. On a sunny Friday afternoon a week before Thanksgiving, just like that?

All of us experienced it in roughly the same way, a coming of age that was unwelcome and frightening, and which unbeknownst to each of us, was a catalyst for things to come. Indeed, some would argue it all went to hell after that. From Vietnam through Watergate and back again, we lived and rambled through the sixties until 1975 when that last chopper left Saigon. Now looking back it is difficult to recall what the country looked like pre-1960, except that it was more hidden from view and therefore less urgent. Things were brewing, and we were involved in marches and readings and singing and protests. But it was being fed to us in small doses, maybe two minutes out of an evening news broadcast or a few questions on a talk show or during a press conference.

All of that changed with the media becoming more and more the defining force in our daily lives, gradually building up to the then improbable 24 hours of broadcasting on too many channels to even count, and of course the internet. Now everything is thrown in our face, from massacres to wars to assassinations to tsunamis to nuclear accidents, to real time terrorist attacks, and we become skeptical of “Breaking News” stories…is this an earth shattering story or another cruise ship fire?  It’s difficult today for our younger brethren to appreciate the impact of that infamous “News Bulletin” with Walter Cronkite interrupting the midday TV shows with the news of shots being fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. Yes, it was a different world then, it was primarily our parents’ world, and ours by inheritance, and we watched it evolve in very short time from a decade of assassinations, war, and riots, to the high definition, information overloaded, yet essentially similar world we have today.

When we remember JFK this November 22, we remember what our country looked like then and the turmoil that was just beginning for all of us. For many of us who lived through those tragic days fifty years ago we look back not only in sadness but in awe; awe at the profound, twisted effect a tragic assassination has had on our history, and sadness that in experiencing the loss of a president we lost forever our basic innocence, our faith in a human capacity to seek out the good and just in all things.