Dark Times of Another Era Remind Me that Change is Coming...

My parents did not agree upon most things but politics were the exception. Fervent republicans, they proudly voted against John F. Kennedy and quietly gloated about it, even after his death.  They were amazingly condescending about the entire Kennedy family which fueled a one-sided competition, another distortion of their relative importance in the world. 

The whispered source of my mother's trust fund had been the same bootlegging industry that helped build the Kennedy fortune.  For this reason my great-grandfather and the Kennedys’ original patriarch would always be symbolically joined at the hip in my parents' eyes. Between our two families of entrepreneurs, the Kennedys had been the wildly successful one, but illegal gain is still illegal gain.  Quick to judge, my father also made reference to Joe Kennedy’s supposed mafia connections, and when the JFK and Marilyn Monroe rumors surfaced, my father percolated with jealousy.  He still claimed their family pedigree was quite inferior to his own, but he never convinced us to adopt his delusions.

Frankly the diversity in big families may help protect our species from extinction and luckily his family was a large one.  His young sister was so impressed  by JFK she made a primitive wood-carving of him.  At the bottom of his portrait she carved his famous quote,  "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."   Personally, that still resonates with me as profoundly as it did then. 

After we clambered onto the school bus the principal told us that JFK had been shot.  We were then sent home for our parents to deal with us.  We were all wailing and crying on the bus, terrified as if ghouls had overtaken us.   Most of our parents probably hoped to shield us from the real repercussions of a society on the edge, but how could they?  I'm sure parents felt that same tragic helplessness after 9/11. 

JFK's assassination was unfathomable. With the exception of my mother, I remember the women on our street crying uncontrollably after learning he had died.  They gathered together at our house, we children surrounding them and hoping when they came home our fathers could make us safe again. 

This was the first time my mother's charismatic personality failed to divert attention away from others and back onto her, as her friends were too distraught to be manipulated. I watched with shame as her frustration escalated, her voice shrill with annoyance and anger.  Eventually she asked them to leave.  Then she isolated herself with a few bottles of good port.  Or maybe it was cheap port, I really don't remember.

A few days later I was the one to whom the mailman handed our copy of Life magazine. The cover featured Jacqueline Kennedy in her beautiful pink suit and pillbox hat, covered with JFK’s blood.  This beautiful woman, completely disheveled and blood-spattered, presented the most telling visual of the horror of that day. Her expression was so pained I do not think I will ever forget the tortured, forlorn look in her eyes. I wish I could forgive the photographer his lack of humanity as he captured her profound misery for posterity, but there was a morbid fascination in seeing this woman's pain so evident and tortured.

Although I was fourteen - an age not noted for compassion for others - we had a personal understanding of the permanence of death.  Like others, I cried day after day while I stared at Kennedy's widow's tragic face.  Finally, unable to bear the heart-wrenching sobs, my parents removed the prompt for my hysteria but life never really returned to normal.

JFK's assassination shaped the minds of my generation and can never be under-estimated. When Martin Luther King, Jr.'s and Robert Kennedy's followed a few years later, it was the darkest of times in our history.  Along with the Vietnam War, the violence that young and old Americans experienced and the divisions over right and wrong seemed to harden us to each other.  Certainly it gave rise to the neo-conservative movement's battle for our psyches, souls and ultimately control of our economy.  We all have seen how that has worked out. 

After the civil changes, violence and war fatigue of the 1960's and 1970's, we wanted to forget about our rights.  We allowed our leaders to belittle the importance of protecting them.  Our voting participation shrank, but more importantly, our intellectual rigor did too.  We let 'other people' run things.  We bought our SUVs, built our 401(k)s, planned retirement to some fantastic developing country like Panama or Costa Rica, assumed social security would care for our aging parents, sent our kids to college with no personal sacrifice but rather a big hunk of financial aid and made up the shorfall by saddling them with student loans.  Oh, and we enjoyed some nice family vacations when the dollar’s exchange rate was favorable, as we got to know our kids, at least who they were on vacation. 

We skipped attending church or temple or taking responsility for our kids' moral education.  We tired of paying for public services for the next generation, so we gutted education and deluded ourselves into believing that our depression-era infrastructure could last another hundred years.  Why?  Because the neo-cons told us that we didn't need to pay taxes but what they really meant was the upper 1% or 2% and the corporations didn’t need to pay taxes.  The burden on the middle class increased and we submitted to a government of the people for the corporations.  We cheered for less government as we quadrupled its size.  We cut regulation of business while we invaded the bedrooms of all and the reproductive parts of  our women.  We cried over a few random parasitic cells being expunged from a woman’s body, but once those cells had formed into a child and were birthed, we lost interest in the little bastards. 

 
Yes we got angry at those damn tax-and-spend Democrats who were stealing from us as they padded the budget with all that fat and those damn earmarks.  We did not care that earmarks might be used for a lot of good things like creating jobs or helping a community get on its feet.  

We thought everybody else should tighten their belt, but we expected to get paid top dollar.  We also thought our employers would continue to pay for the ever-escalating health care premiums that no longer actually covered anything.  As usual, we wanted our cake and we wanted to eat it too.  Marie Antoinette, of course, was perfectly willing to let rabble like me eat cake.  You know where that got her.

Ah well, this is just another rant from another women old enough to know better.  It feels great to speak my mind so loudly I have developed a reputation in some groups as  'Anti-American', 'Sacriligious', 'A Bitch', 'A Whiner' and the most recent insult to my character, 'Lazy'.  After all, who else would want to see Obama's vision achieved for a united, compassionate, respected and respectful America?   Wait, I must also be a ‘socialist’ too.

I would love to believe my parents would have evolved had they lived long enough. After all, is there anyone with a minimum number of brain cells who thinks George W. Bush has done a good job?  Although it is unpopular in some circles to say this, the facts are clear.  John McCain was one of the Republicans who enabled Bush to wreak havoc on our society, our economy, our treasury, our international reputation, our security here and abroad while he was also authorizing the torture of other human beings. Senator McCain, shame on you.  You know about torture and this makes your recent position all the more disgusting.

Bad as these individual combatants may or may not be, they are prisoners of war.  With one pathetic exception, they have not been tried, so we have no way of knowing what crimes they are even accused of committing.  Bush's torture polices are against all human decency and the rules civilized nations agreed to during the Geneva Convention.  My father, a judgmental WWII veteran, would have been as ashamed as I am. 

Out of all tragedy, however, there is always some opportunity.  We may have finally woken up.  All it took was the illegal war in Iraq, the unnecessary deaths of over 5,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and millions of Iraqi civilians and the billions, if not trillions, plundered by the Halliburtons and Investment Bankers along with a crashed-and-burned economy.  We may not yet be demonstrating in the streets, but when 85,000 people in Portland, Oregon or 100,000 in Colorado attend an Obama rally.... and millions more blog daily to keep the lies, mistruths, innuendo and hate from infesting and infecting the greater population... there is an undeniable movement underway. 

Change is coming.

Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...  and on January 20, 2009 it will be liberty and justice for all!