Editor’s Note
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Archive for November 20th, 2008

Nov. 22, 1963: Where were you?

Add comment November 20th, 2008

When you’re 13 not much matters except boys, your girlfriends, music and maybe must-do homework. Oh, and not liking being told what to do by your parents. At 13, you’re certainly not terribly distressed by who wins the presidential election, whether the stock market is up or down (as long as you keep getting an allowance), or what new political legislation is making its way through city council.

Not at 13. Not until the adult world crashes through your fluffy teenage cocoon. Not until it was Nov. 22, 1963, and you were 13 and in eighth grade algebra class and the teacher starts wandering around with tears streaming down her face and saying things like “oh, my God, the Russians will invade us now.”

Finally, she stopped fluttering like Henny Penny and turned to the class who was watching her in stunned horror — with no small amount of amusement, I should add — and explained: They just shot the president. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

Ah. Dallas. Where’s that, we wondered from our classroom in Augusta, Ga. Kennedy we knew, well, sort of. The idea of a presidential shooting was so far removed from our 13-year-old reality that we simply sat there waiting. Waiting for cues: How are we supposed to respond? Do we cry like the teachers? Should we be worried that the Russians were to bomb us in our sleep as the teachers were saying was going to happen? Were we supposed to go to our next class? Was the test in next period going to be postponed? What about cheerleading practice after school?

They let us out of school early that day and we hopped the bus or walked home to watch hours and hours of television, where we could stay up late and learn things no 13-year-old should need to know.

That was the day my generation of baby boomers learned our world was not safe. The day we learned adults didn’t understand much more than we did, and they certainly did not have the answers we sought. They weren’t so omnipotent after all. That was the day baby boomers learned that big and powerful — as an individual or a country — was not a guarantee of immortality. We were never the same trusting children after that November day.

We have spent the past 45 years distrusting, wearing a mantle of cynicism that too often precluded celebrating the best humankind offers. We became the hardest working, most demanding generation in 100 years and we grasped for ourselves the best we could get with little thought about what was good for the group, for the whole.

Good for me, that was what we learned on Nov. 22, 1963. Our over-reaching “what’s good for me” shows itself in auto executives who fly corporate jets to Washington to beg for a handout. It shows in our unrelenting militarism that says do it our way or we’ll whop you up-side the head. It shows in a staggering greed that created a global financial scheme that rewarded the ones inside and is devastating those outside.

At 13, we are not supposed to know that bad things happen to good people. When we learn too soon, we pay the price for a generation to come.