I was sitting on my bed, the bottom bunk of a 3-girl dorm room my freshman year in college when the news came. I couldn't comprehend it. I had been sheltered from the harshness of the world. I didn't know that people ... our leaders ... could be assassinated. Oh, I knew it in the history-book sort of way, not in the right-now, not to someone like Jack Kennedy sort of way. I couldn't process it so I shut down and walked through the next days and weeks in a fog. I didn't watch the funeral on television. I didn't cry. I just felt abandoned.
For many of us children of the 60s, this was the day we lost our innocence, our belief in a golden future, our belief in our own power to make a difference. For some of us it came back slowly and slightly less bright-eyed. For others, the path to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll beckoned.
Perhaps it is a joy to remember these shared tragedies, to feel part of a community of mourners, to acknowledge the great loss to all of us as we entered the season of assassinations that would take Jack, Martin and Bobby in a still incomprehensible waste of potential and hope for the world.
Blessings and a peaceful heart to you.
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I still recall that day in November as if it just happened, and the others, too, and the awful riots in D.C. in '68, and Vietnam, still raging.
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