Thoughts on 1963 [and 2001]

WARNING: This is a ramble.

Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the close of a weekend that probably anybody over fifty won’t forget, the weekend that Presdient Kennedy was killed, mourned, paraded, and buried.

I’m not sure what makes the people in mainstream media choose what is newsworthy and how much to focus on something, but it seems that this year there was little attention given to the anniversaries.

November 22, 1963 shares a lot with September 11, 2001.

In 1963 the nation was steeped in the post-war idea that we were a strong and invincible country, that our only real enemies were the Communists and their sympathizers among us. We thought we were entering on a new era with a young president, the first one born in the twentieth century.

In 2001 we were beginning a whole new century. We still felt the euphoria of the end of the Cold War. We knew that we had some discontent in the country, but nobody took that seriously.

We all woke up on both of those days. And those who were old enough will never forget where they were or what they were doing when they learned about them. [Personally, I was in high school American History class when the word that JFK was shot was put on the school intercom and at home listening to Barbara Carlson when I heard her saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she meant the one downtown, so I turned on my television to see if one of the local stations had any video. I got a surprise.]

On November 25, 1963 people all across the nation were watching their televisions. Most people only had affiliates of major networks available to them and the major networks had shown nothing but news and commentaries [no commercials] related to JFK or the new president, Mr. Johnson and what might happen in the future. The television and other media had crowded the Dallas Police Department headquarters and we had seen Oswald moved from room to room several times, protesting his innocence to all the cameras and reporters present. On Sunday the 24^th with the whole country watching he was killed. Talk of conspiracy has gone on ever since and probably will never stop. The 29^th century version of the History Channel on whatever the 29^th century replacement we have for television will probably still be asking questions about it.

There was a late morning memorial service in the city I lived in at a theater downtown and my brother and I went to it. [School was canceled almost every place in the country.] We heard the various civic leaders and clergymen from almost all of the big religious traditions speak or pray about how it shouldn’t have happened.

When we got back home we saw the conclusion of the funeral and the burial at Arlington Cemetery. I remember that the bugler who was to play Taps had not kept his mouthpiece warm and bungled it a bit, something that my band teacher found incomprehensible.

But later on November 25 things started to get back to normal. After the funeral regular programming and commercials resumed and our teachers tried to find ways to get back to us the day of learning they seemed to feel that we had lost. Actually, I had learned a lot.

On this anniversary of the Kennedy burial, it does us well to remember all of our national traumas, to think about their similarities and differences, and learn from them.