My fingers were fumbling at the keyboard in typing class that day in 1963, exactly 51 years ago, when the teacher from across the hall came into the room and whispered in Miss Jefferson's ear.
Her face turned white.
The other teacher left and Miss Jefferson broke into tears as she announced that President Kennedy had been shot and taken to a hospital in Dallas.
No one said a word.
Moment's later the other teacher returned. He didn't have to say a word. His face, a portrait of horror and helplessness said it all. We knew. He knew we knew. Holding back tears, he shrugged awkardly, turned -- and left.
The unimaginable had happened.
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President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the man who had exhorted us to "ask what we could do for our country", the man who had created the Peace Corps, inspired a sense of hope for a better world, and instilled a profound sense of public service in many of my youthful contemporaries, had been assassinated. It took my breath away.
It was only the beginning.
Within the next five years, more shots rang out. Three more champions of the real American Dream, the ongoing human quest to create a society that fosters human freedom, dignity, equality, and justice had fallen.
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| RFK with widowed Mrs. King. 2 months later he was dead |
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| Martin Luther King and Malcolm X |
First
Malcolm X, then
Martin Luther King Jr., then President Kennedy's own brother, Senator
Robert Kennedy were martyred. Each of these courageous visionaries, in
their unique way, stirred our souls to action as America
grappled to come to terms with it's own homegrown Apartheid, a cycle of
poverty that impoverished millions of people of all races, and a
bellicose foreign policy dictated by the interests of its growing
military-industrial-intelligence complex that threatened to destroy us
all. They each held a vision of the way "it's supposed to be."
Living the Dream to them wasn't about Madison Avenue's promotion of the individual pursuit of self-interested material acquisition and mindless entertainment. The True Dream of American democracy to them, and to many of us, was about things like forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, and promoting the general welfare. You know, what we had learned in high school civics class.
Each of these leaders, in their own way, encouraged us to live up to the democratic ideals set out in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, the same document that our current band of right-wingers (and their majority on the U.S. Supreme Court) seem to think is all about giving a wealthy elite free reign to exploit the rest of us as they move toward their own dreams of an American Empire. Sigh.
I think it's time for Marvin Gaye again. I need a good cry.
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