Thursday, November 21, 2013

Half A Century

No matter how you look at it 50 years is a long time.  Some  humans I have known didn’t get to live that long

50 years ago this Friday President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas Texas.

I was just a kid sitting in a junior high school classroom.


Every classroom had a big clock and a speaker mounted together high up on the wall. The teacher had a switch and could call the office and they would answer through the speaker, so everyone could hear. The clock just ticked away the school day.

That day 50 years ago all of a sudden the speaker came on with a news broadcast. I do not think any of us had ever heard news broadcast come over the speaker. The whole class was startled, and then the news was about the president being shot in Texas. The news played for a while. The teacher might have cried, but we kids didn’t really know what to make of the situation.

Later the principal came on and said the president had died, and school was over for the day.
The crossing guard hadn’t made it to his post but the normally busy street was quiet, all the way walking home you could here TV’s broadcasting the news that Kennedy had died, and Johnson had been sworn in as president.

TV brought us the funeral. Our world had changed.

I became politically aware a few years later and never believed the Warren Commission Report.
I always thought nixon was behind the whole thing.

Martín King and Robert Kennedy were gunned down by then and nixon was president, promising to end the war (as soon as enough money was made by his pals)


Several years ago I saw a documentary on the Warren Commission report. The evidence that they had, sort of made their conclusion believable.
Now half a century later I’m back to believing nixon and the rest of the republicans were behind the murders of JFK, RFK and Dr. King

Kennedy forced us to live up to the values of our democracy. We fought for civil rights. We went to the moon. We started the peace core, went on 50 mile hikes, and we even did what we could do for our country.

Now we just fight endless flipping wars, take food stamps away from the hungry, beat up the middle class and unions for fighting to provide a living wage, and pay corporate bosses millions to buy our government. We have gone backwards for the last 50 years, almost makes me glad that on the 100 year anniversary I should be aboot 110, and long gone.

No comments:

Post a Comment