As I began to write this blog, I realized that it was today, 58 years ago, that the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas Texas. If I didn’t date this blog, I wouldn’t have thought about it. How about you? How many of you remember that day or learned about it in school?
I remember coming home from school and being on a public bus when people started crying. I can still picture it and for the next few weeks, our country was traumatized. An American president with so much promise being murdered on live television while in a motorcade. How shocking and incomprehensible.
Many people who I have spoken to remember where they were and how they found out at the time of the shooting. They can still visualize where they were and what they felt. For days after, we were glued to the television set for news reports and the eventual funeral.
America had suffered one of the worst traumas in its history.
There are questions that still remain about who was responsible and why it even happened. I am not sure we will ever know the answers to these questions although conspiracy questions remain.
Now as I think about it, this event was hardly mentioned in the news today. Perhaps we have been desensitized by the traumas of September 11th attacks, other assassinations, and multiple wars our country has fought in.
Perhaps, we have become too numbed or politically divided to remember the past. This is an event which should be remembered and memorialized today.
As George Santayana, the Spanish philosopher wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
When will we listen?
