The Defining moment of our Generation

 Every Generation has that moment, the one that takes away your innocence and shocks you forever.  For my parents, that was Pearl Harbor, my daughter, 9/11  For me it was the very public assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Like everyone old enough to remember, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.  I was five years old and in the back seat of my mom's green Bel Air ( the one with the wings).  When the news came on the radio, my mother pulled over to the curb at the corner of Bartee and Van Nuys and sobbed.  She kept saying "oh that young man" although Kennedy was older than both my parents.  I was on my way home from Kindergarten.  I think they closed the schools for a day or so so the nation could mourn,

On this day, as I usually do, my thoughts turn to the last survivor of his children, Caroline, who is just a bit older than me.  It must be awful, every year to have the news reflect on the murder of her father.  This year is particularly heinous, as the Mag-nuts decided that not ONLY would her father appear at Daley Plaza to announce his support of Trump for President, but her late brother John would announce his co-candidacy as Trump's running mate.

These people have skipped more than one groove here.  But they believe it wholeheartedly and I bet they are sending not-quite-candidate Trump barrels of money in support of the pairing.  The things that strike me, in no particular order, are:

• Despite persistent conspiracy theories that Jack Kennedy was kept alive and was in some secret wing of an unnamed hospital, he would be 104 years old.
• They found John and cremated his body.  There were autopsy reports.
• The Kennedy Family are DEMOCRATS and despite one or two crackpots ( I'm looking at YOU RFK , Jr) would not be in the same philosophical camp as Trump ( the Kennedy Family believes that to whom much is given, much is required, Trump has an opposite view.)
• They MUST be confusing JOHN with that not-part-of the Joe-Kennedy-line guy in Louisiana, John Neely Kennedy. HE would probably personally wet himself if Trump came calling.

On this day, I think about what our country might have been, had JFK lived.  Would we have gotten into Vietnam?  Probably.  Would the Civil Rights movement have moved faster?  We took his quest to get us to the moon seriously, but what about the rest of his plans.  Can we ever know them?

On this day, I will ponder this:

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

May it be so.