March 2, 2013

• 1963

  A young man at another site I occassionally post stuff at had a display of photos from the year 1963. His photos garnered several responses but I really felt there was a combination of older people- many my age or older who seemed a bit rusty or simply uninvolved emotionally to that year’s events. The younger people, of course, I can only accept that they weren’t there so they have only heresay to rely on.

  The photos included the first Buddhist monk who self-immolated to protest the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists, JFK’s Lincoln speeding away with the secret serviceman climbing onto the trunk  after Kennedy’d been shot, pictures of New York City when  the Empire State Building was still the tallest building in the world and several other iconic images from that year.

  Anyway this was my response:

   

   

  1963 represents one big fact for me.

  JFK’s assassination was for me and others unprecedented. The swiftness with which it occurred and the utter finality of the consequences were unique events because of the confluence of television with it’s particular immediacy and because of the events that were brewing within the country and the world and just as much because of the vitality and magnetic aura that was John F. Kennedy. We’d never had a President who held press conferences and gave as good as he took during it – JFK’s press conferences seemed like truly “living” events. The Cuban Missle Crisis a year before he was murdered had the world on edge, understandably. It was also an unprecidented event. I remember JFK being criticized and just as much I remember everyone else involved with US government and the Russians being criticized as well.

  

   

  I’ve always felt, in retrospect, that Kennedy’s final choice as to how to handle the crisis with a naval embargo was wise and ended up calling the bluff over the so-called nuclear “option”. It’s not that I or anyone who was alive at the time didn’t find it terrifying but there must have been a sizable portion of humanity that felt that fundamentally no one really wants to destroy everything to make a point.

  JFK’d also championed what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also got the Russians to sign a nuclear test ban treaty which was an enormous achievement- it was even more remarkable that the United States houses of Congress approved it than the fact that the Soviets did.

  Kennedy had some reputation as a Cold Warrior in the 50s but he also offered direct support to the so-called third-world non-aligned movements in the world’s politics. Kennedy was ahead of the pack in supporting the efforts of African nations. And I think that Kennedy was someone whose experience in politics changed him in ways that many were not comfortable with.

  I think those who truly weren’t comfortable with him murdered him.

  The main recipients of the spoils from Kennedy’s death were what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial” complex. JFK’s biggest opponents within the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cuban Missle Crisis thought a nuclear strike on Cuba or even a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union were better “options” to deal with the crisis.

  Many who knew Kennedy said he’d frankly told them he wanted to get all US troops out of Vietnam. That could not have been a popular option to many who felt entitled to positions of power- most of them unelected- in these United States.

  I’ve felt in my heart that a great deal could’ve been different in the USA the last 50 years. Still we- the actual people- are the ones who started the Civil Rights movement and who kicked open the doors for Gay people and saw the class differences in the way women were treated and opposed the degradation of the very earth we all depend on. The politicians have followed after a few decades of pressure for the most part. And that’s probably the way it should be ideally. But there was a time when some of us glimpsed a possibility that maybe as a people we could’ve used a good quarterback, too.

  There’s a book I’ve recently read that puts together a lot of information surround JFK’s death and the realities of those times and does so in the service of certain beliefs. You could call those beliefs spiritual. But the picture that emerges- powerfully summoned here- is a very dark one but it’s literal highlights illuminate much of what I’ve instinctively felt about those days in 1963 and about the repercussions that have followed our fate ever since. Here’s a web site that gives some introduction:

  http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-why-he-died-and-why-it-matters/16273

  That November 22nd, a Friday, and throughout that grim weekend it seemed like one big long “day the music died”. I remember reading a woman columnist who’d written that JFK’s death wasn’t about “that we’d never smile again”, but rather, that we would simply “never be young again” in just such a way. Maybe it’s appropriate that a musical phenonmenon was poised to be a welcome distraction- the Beatles. They were unprecidented too.

  Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded Kennedy of course and he did push through some key legislation with a big help from an enormous upwelling of sympathy and empathy for those ideas associated with JFK’s “New Frontier”. I think it’s fair to say that LBJ, while a legendary legislator who knew how to pressure his peers, was a very uncharismatic, even homely stand-in for what a nation had in all too brief a time gotten accustomed to in their whip-smart President who was not before and now could never be successfully equated with “business as usual”.

  Vietnam, of course snowballed into a major war and went on longer than either or both World War One and World War Two. What Eisenhower had warned against had come to pass and is at this very day more deeply imbedded into our “way of life” than ever.

  Most of our Presidents since JFK have been chumps. Let’s face it; they go along to get along. Except when they’re dangerous to our health directly like Reagan and Dumb-ya.

  You’re damn right you better “be the change you want”.

  And, though, we are here to make the best of our “march of progress” it matters that we realize that our “drone” war continues (at least it takes our minds off asteroids, right?) and numbers of the most honest and noble among us are imprisoned for telling the truth by our “liberal” President and we once again dance to the tune of “austerity” when many of us need a living income in order to buy the things that will sustain a “livable” economy and that large numbers of our countrymen and children are malnourished.

  Try not to blame me too much for wanting another “1963″ that gets to have a happy ending this time

  • 3:20 am
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