JFK
It was afternoon and I was on my way to a chemistry class. I had stopped for a drink of water when the news came over the speakers in the classrooms.
For those who weren’t alive at the time: remember what you felt on September 11, 2001 for a taste of November 22, 1963. It was a massive change for the worldview of my generation and it marked the beginning of a period of disruption and decline in the civility of American society. Arthur had died and Camelot fell.
At his inauguration John Kennedy made the point: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
The colors of my world will never be as bright as they were on November 21, 1963.
9 comments
“Arthur had died and Camelot fell.” Hope fled the hearts of many. My wife’s immediate family never ever voted again after JFK died. Even now, my wife refuses to vote for that reason. I was a high school freshman In Orange county. I remember the universal anger, fear and incredible sadness.
It would be hard to explain to people who didn’t have Duck & Cover drills in school, or weren’t around for the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, how much fear was lurking just below the surface in the US at the time.
After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated it was not unusual to hear people say that voting for liberals just made them targets.
I mark that day as the beginning of the end of our nation. And I am not optimistic about the nature of that end when it finally comes. JFK’s assassination was proof positive that one person or a small group of people can in fact change the world… but only for the worse.
I am not an outright conspiracy theorist, but as the Koch brothers and their ilk begin to be exposed for the machinations they are revealed to have undertaken, I can’t entirely discount the possibility of a conspiracy of the “haves” to dominate, once and for all, the “have-nots,” much in the way masters dominate slaves. JFK, indisputably a “have” himself, clearly wanted to put a stop to that trend. In the end, that is very likely what killed him.
“But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”
– Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here 1935
The individuals are usually dupes of the demagogues who convince them that they are on a righteous mission, and that their goals are the real “American values”. After the individual acts with bloody results, the demagogues claim that they don’t condone such acts of violence, but they can understand the individual’s motivation.
The only way out of this mess is to have real liberals running for offices at all levels of government, so real Democrats will show up at the polls and vote. As long as both major parties are running conservative candidates financed by the 1%, nothing is going to change. As long as everyone bases ‘electability’ on the size of a candidate’s campaign account, nothing will change. As long as the system is based on money, the people with the most money have all of the power.
I don’t disagree with ” As long as both major parties are running conservative candidates financed by the 1%, nothing is going to change. ” But I do challenge the term “conservative”. They are conservative as Mussolini, using any tool at their disposal: again, from Sinclair Lewis, ” “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”.
Are we there yet?
Actually that supposed Sinclair Lewis quote is of uncertain parentage, being attributed to Lewis and Huey Long, among others. Lewis wrote similar things in many places, but he always linked the movement to business interests.
The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have undergone major changes in basic meaning over the decades, so they aren’t very useful other than identifying the parties that claim them. The Liberal Party of Australia is the ‘conservative’ party, while the Labor Party is the ‘liberal’ party. More than slightly confusing…
I agree that it isn’t very conservative to claim loyalty to a history that never existed outside of the imagination of a few writers of fiction being passed off as of the Truth.
I was only 6 so JFK’s assassination had little impact on me, but it did have a big impact on my maternal Grandfather and Mom. My Grandfather taught me:
“Facism is a political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and opposes free elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Fascism is strongly associated with fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.”
Oh, and this is a nice summary:
The second graphic explains the bottom of the first, although there are a number of officials who call themselves Democrats that I would include with McConnell and Boehner, and I won’t vote for any of them. I always look at what they have done, especially how they have voted, not what they say in campaign ads [most which I don’t see, or ignore].
My years reading Soviet agitprop has made me hypersensitive to propaganda in all its forms. When you have clowns, like your current government, claiming that a budget cut for a program that they promised not to cut, isn’t really breaking their promise, you know they are delusional, or think that voters are too stupid to notice.