Or, as it seems to me…
Fifty years later…
I was a young boy in Catholic school in 1963 when, in the early afternoon, it was announced that the President had been shot. Not long after, it was announced that the President had died and we were all sent home. At home, on that rainy November day, standing in our living room, looking out at Bryant Avenue, watching buses trundle down the rain slicked street, in a grey room on a grey day, I turned to my mother and asked her a question for which she had no answer: what kind of country are we to do this?
I remember distinctly the color of the wood frames of the window, that I was looking out to the world and looking to the world to give me an answer. That year the living room was painted an ivory color: I was standing behind a chair with a pink velvet back, next to a marble top that held ashtrays for guests, cocktail napkins and other assorted party goods, I remember all those odd details because that was where I was standing when I understood that Kennedy had died. Not where I was when we I heard it but where I was when I understood he was dead.
I was crying that afternoon, once I realized what had happened. I hadn’t realized what had happened when I heard the news; I only realized it when I was home, in the safety of my home, in the warmth of my home, in a place where I thought I was allowed to feel.
I was Catholic. Kennedy was the first Catholic president. We had all watched his inauguration on television in school on the portable television I had carried to school from my bedroom. It was a major moment for Catholics, though not for my family. We were Republicans and had supported Nixon – definitely a minority at Visitation School that year, 1960, when he had been elected.
The 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy has brought back to me all kinds of memories of those days, the day he died, seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live television, the day he was buried. I recall we watched CBS, Walter Cronkite’s voice carrying us through the trauma of having what we thought of as a lovely young man, youngest man elected to the Presidency, with a lovely family, the leader of the free world, a man of eloquent words and the capability of stirring men to motion, gone in a sudden, mad moment that even today seems incomprehensible.
Conspiracy theories flow like a raging river even now; there are conferences for them, those who think Kennedy’s death was the result of a far-right conspiracy or the result of Castro’s revenge, or that the Mafia organized his death or Lyndon Johnson’s Texas cabal organized the President’s death to catapult their man into office; it was Kennedy’s own driver who murdered him. There were shots everywhere on the grassy knoll. There are, it seems, a thousand theories and a hundred conspiracies, which have kept the case from closing on Kennedy’s death. The Warren Commission was a white wash. It goes on and on and will probably never end.
Kennedy was a man who said: A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. And Kennedy was an idea that has lived on despite our growing knowledge of his flaws and faults and all too mortal foibles, of his dalliances with interns, movie stars and mob connected women. He accomplished only a middling amount in Congress but he was an idea and he lives on, an idea that drove us to the moon and back, an idea that created the Peace Corps, an idea that still inspires us to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”
He is gone. Those of us who remember where we were when we heard he had died are entering our late middle age or more and will be exiting the stage. The 50th Anniversary of his death is a marker for those who remember where they were; fifty years is a long time, a lifetime, a half-century in which the world has radically changed.
It is said his death marked the end of innocence but we were not innocent then. We were a deeply divided country, simmering with rage over integration and economic issues that bubbled over in the years following his death. His death was the punctuation point for all the troubles to come.
But Kennedy was an idea and he lives on, an idea, an abstract, held in higher regard than any other post war President, 90% of people think he did a wonderful job and they think that because he is an idea that lives on, an eloquent idea that drew us beyond ourselves both while he lived and since he has died.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York August 11, 2014
August 11, 2014Letter From New York
August 10, 2014
Or, as it seems to me…
Sunday mornings usually have a bit of a ritual. I wake up, start the coffee I’ve prepared the night before and while sipping that first, oh so important, cup peruse the New York Times on either my iPhone or my iPad. If I am ambitious, which is not as often as I think it should be, I go down to Christ Church for services.
At some point on Sunday, I go through the “Weddings/Celebrations” section of the Times. It gives me great pleasure to see same sex wedding announcements. I didn’t think that would ever happen in my lifetime. So I honor those folks by reading their stories. Many of them cause me to smile.
I think I enjoy it because it gives me a sense of hope for the world; that we’re actually moving on from old prejudices. It is heartening in a frequently disheartening world, a gentling of the world, reflected in one major thing having changed in the universe.
My good friends, David and Annette, came up this weekend and stayed with me. We celebrated years of friendship over an excellent dinner of farm fresh foods – salad fixings direct from the garden, recently butchered organic meat, summer squash, potatoes pulled from the earth only the day before. They brought an excellent Pinot Noir and we ate at the dining room table after David had grilled the steaks on the barbeque. Spectacular.
We had great conversation. The world is fodder for it and it is impossible to run away from the trouble that is assaulting the world. Ebola is now an International Health Crisis. Ann Coulter has raged against the doctor who contracted the disease while serving as a Christian missionary in Africa. He should have stayed home according to her.
ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now controlling a great swath of the both Syria and Iraq, seems determined to drag the region they control back to feudal times. Christians have been driven from their homes, as have Yazidis, who practice a faith that seems to combine Christianity, Islam and Zoroasterism. They, along with Christians and Shiites are “infidels” who deserve to die according to ISIS. Some Yazidis have been reported buried alive and some women taken as slaves while other have fled to the desert hot Mount Sinjar, where there has been some relief provided by the US dropping humanitarian supplies while fighter planes and drones attack the advancing ISIS troops, who are proving hard to beat back.
There is not a huge amount I can do about the Christians and Shia and Yazidis, except to donate to relief services – though I haven’t seen many appeals.
We are a world in need. I agonize over the daily pleas I get from any number of worthy causes, sometimes slipping toward a kind of despair because the needs are far greater than my wallet. We have a border crisis that revolves around children, illegal immigrants, yes, but children too. Many of them are fleeing San Pedro Sula in Honduras, now the murder capital of the world, a city I visited as a teen when my brother was running a clinic for children in nearby El Progresso, itself then described as the “armpit of Central America.” Things have gone from bad to worse there – as they seem to be in so many places, going from bad to worse.
It is unbelievable to me in some ways that I can have a wonderful and civilized dinner with two wonderful and civilized friends while some thousands of miles away ISIS is burying alive people because they believe differently. It reminds me of the way Catholics and Protestants treated each other several centuries ago during the Thirty Years War.
We live, so many of us, blessed lives here in the West while in other parts of the world madmen seem to roam freely, seeking to enforce a way of life that appears insane to us in the West. I wouldn’t call the leadership of ISIS enlightened.
But then we are the Infidel.
Tags: Ebola, Iraq, Isis, Mathew Tombers, Same sex marriage, San Pedro Sula, Thirty Years War, Yazidis
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