Lest We Forget

(I'm sitting here in tears listening to soul singer Marvin Gaye's rendition of "Abraham, Martin, John" as I write this. )


It was exactly 59 years ago today.

My fingers were fumbling away at the keyboard in Mrs. Jefferson's 5th period typing class when the teacher from across the hall came into the room, walked to her desk, leaned over, and whispered in her ear.

Mrs. Jefferson's  face turned white.

The other teacher left and Mrs. 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," instilling a profound sense of public service in many of my youthful contemporaries; the man who had inspired us to envision a better world, 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. 

RFK with widowed Mrs. King. 2 months later he was dead.

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, is what was proclaimed -- if not acted upon -- in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.  Although blinded to their own white supremacist, patriarchal, and wealthy elitism, the authors did attempt to create a structure that held the promise of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, and promoting the general welfare.  The Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X sought to make America live up to its promise

Unfortunately that same document, interpreted quite differently, has empowered our current band of right-wingers (and their majority on the U.S. Supreme Court) to propel us toward an oligarchy where a wealthy elite that includes those who control the fossil fuel and weapons industries and those who espouse fundamentalist Christian values to have free reign to exploit the rest of us as they move toward their own dreams of an Holy American Empire.  Sigh.

I think it's time for Marvin Gaye again.  I need a good cry.