Soon we would find out about the governmental lies that led to the growth of the war in Viet Nam. People began to stand up, not only for Civil Rights, but also to oppose the war and to push for governmental openness, with a return to more democracy and less secrecy.
Several years later, in the late '60s and early '70s I was teaching an American Studies class to high school juniors and seniors, and, for clarity, I was showing films about each of the more recent decades. As I was watching the film about the '60s it just hit me like a "eureka moment", the realization of how different life had been before the assassination of JFK and how different it was now. It was like an entirely different world.
Those bullets stopped the growth and development of this nation, and over the intervening years, we have become a very controlled and manipulated nation, with power based on wealth while democracy rapidly fades away. We are now a nation too focused on our forever wars while protecting the wealth of some at the expense of everyone else. We find ourselves on the verge of Cold War II, with domestic needs and the need to deal with environmental change only secondary.
Shortly before his assassination, near the end of October 1963 in a speech at Amherst College as part of a ceremony to honor Robert Frost, Kennedy said, "I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with its wisdom, its power with its purpose." That vision seems to have been lost in our history.
To put things in context, sixty years, the length of our marriage, was also the measure of time since we turned our back on a more humanized response to American life and all human life on this planet and replaced it with a nation more based on wealth and power.
(There are, of course, many books about JFK, the assassination and the war in Viet Nam but I want to mention 2 that I found particularly helpful in understanding JFK and his administration. To understand his administration ; "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and by far the best exploration of his assassination; "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James W. Douglas.)
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