Just an odd thought on November 22
I was born two years after the Kennedy assassination (well, close enough). Though it happened before I was born, I grew up in the shadow of that event, in the changed America that resulted. I knew that almost everybody older than I was thought of it as a major event in their lives, one of those things after which “it never was the same.” But to me it was second-hand, despite the books on the assassination that I devoured voraciously for a time when I was about 10 or 11.
And now, I realize that the children born this year will probably relate to 9/11/01 the same way I related to 11/22/63.
But, and this is what history and people’s recounting of it is all about, kids born today will be just as emotionally removed from 9/11 as I feel like I am from Kennedy (born ’68). Intellectually, I know that his assasination was a tectonic shift in the U.S. sociologiocal mindset. But I will never have the soul tie to Nov. 22 that those born closer to the date (or before it enough to have witnessed it as kids) will have forever.
Right. It’s just kind of a weird thought. Time goes on.
Speaking of 1968… my mom had a portrait of Bobby Kennedy on the wall at our house for many years after 1968. But I was really too young to know what that was all about, either.