This is the anniversary of JFK's assassination. I had just turned eighteen, and was in my freshman college dorm when I heard a radio in the bathroom, and walked in to hear Cronkite. I walked down a few blocks until I found a church and sat down in a pew. It was unbelievable news, and though I was not crazy about JFK after the Bay of Pigs a few months before, when we high schoolers were drilled in huddling under our desks in case of nuclear attack, I knew it was a horrible event, and I thought of his children and young wife. My then boyfriend was not upset. He didn't like Kennedy. So I stayed away from him. I had no religion anymore, but being in a church was comforting, as I'd spent so much time inside one until I was a senior in high school, when one day it just all peeled off me like an old skin. I searched every church and religion, and found that Buddhism appealed to me the most, but it would be many decades before I turned towards that practice and made a commitment.
It was many years before I saw video of the event, or knew specific details. I think my first viewing was in Oliver Stone's JFK. So I did not have graphic images. My images were of Jackie with the blood on her pink suit, JFK Jr saluting, the horse drawn carriage carrying the body. I felt a great deal more when RFK died, and I was in Fiji, where my Marist Brothers fellow teachers were satirical about the ultra violent U.S. And MLK died while I was half way around the world as well. I was removed from images and detail until years later.
But such events are indelible to those who live through them, and the anniversaries occasions for the sadness of all loss, especially the loss of idealism.
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