Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago, November 22^nd … I was in my High School art class taking a clumsy stab at portraiture. I had chosen two pictures: one of JFK and the other, Abraham Lincoln. I admit now that I wasn’t doing a very good job of it… just couldn’t get it right. The school intercom interrupted, announcing that the President had been shot. His condition was unknown and that all students were to return to their home-rooms. I was stunned… if that is the right word for it… I had a knee-jerk reflex… “Nixon did it!” I said out loud and immediately sensed the ridiculousness of my accusation.

It was shock… I hadn’t been so shocked until 9/11. Some of us, myself included, were openly crying. My shock turned to grief: the sorrow was so profound. Though the impact of it was equaled by 9/11, the quality of the sorrow transcended anything I have felt since. Of course, the assassinations Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were significant but I had become so much more cynical by then. As a nation we were so much more innocent.

Some of the students couldn’t handle the grief and had done as I had at first, they responded with accusation. A girl at the front of the class said, “The communists did it.”

A jock opined, “No, it was a “n” that done it.”

Another said it was likely a Dixi-crat.

My grief called me out of shock, and frankly, I am most proud of my little speech I cried out from the back of the room, “He was not shot by anyone but us. We killed him with our intolerance! We killed him with our ignorance! Sure as shit it wasn’t anyone else that killed him!”

You could have heard a mouse fart it was so quiet. I had my audience so I added one more thing in my diatribe, “Now, shut the fuck up and cry for yourselves.”

I still feel that way when I hear conspiracy theories and I can’t watch the plethora of programs devoted to the subject played on TV, ad infinitum, the last week no matter how objective or sincere the production might be. Just like 9/11, ignorance propelled some of us into wild hysteria by ego-tripping A-holes. Anger and ignorance rules where sanity is abandoned. I believe it doesn’t matter who acts out in such a way as to take out a leader or smash our consciousness with extreme acts of nihilism. We will never find out exactly what happened in Dallas that day… we won’t find out for sure. There are assassinations going back to Roman times that have never been fully explained. What is most important isn’t about who did what to whom… but rather, how does our emotional response affect us and our so-called solutions? How much are we going to give up our civil liberties as a result of our anger and fears?

The world we live in today would have been unimaginable on that day in Dallas. From gun-control to the “War on Drugs”… from Homeland Security, to a simple matter of a national ID card… how much are we willing to give up when it would have been better to feel the grief and process it before running in circles like a headless chicken?

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