HomeNovember 22, 1997
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where were you when?Where were you on November 22, 1963? I was in the 7th grade classroom at St. Bernard's School. Sister Richard Marie announced in a solemn voice, as if announcing the end of the world: "The president has been shot." Later on we got another bulletin: JFK was dead. Even then I knew I would never forget where I was and what I was doing at that moment. Even today I can see the battered old desks and chairs that were screwed to the floor. I can see the polished wood floor and the dusty blackboard and the dust on the hem of Sister Richard Marie's black habit. I can see the tarmac of the schoolyard as I walked across it to the church for confession and the Friday afternoon novena. There was construction going on next door and the machines were really loud that day. I remember wondering how they could work. It's funny but ever since then I've had the feeling that we are constantly on the verge of the end of the world. I don't know if sociologists and psychologists have done much research on the effects of the Cold War and the Kennedy Assassination on the psyche of the "baby boom" generation. I haven't seen any serious scholarship on this, but it doesn't mean there isn't any. I did a Yahoo search on "JFK" and came up with slews and slews of sites devoted to conspiracy theories. For a lot of people, studying Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories is a hobby to which they devote their lives - kind of like paranoid trekkies. But it all seem disconnected from the context of the times. I mean this end of the world feeling comes not just from the assassination but from the Cuban missile crisis, from Kruschev's "we will bury you" speech, from the constant shadow of the bomb. Much of the science fiction I read in my youth was of the post apocalypse genre. There was a lot of it around when I was in my teens - the prime age for science fiction. I stopped reading science fiction around age 30 and for some reason have never gone back to it. I don't know why I stopped nor why it doesn't appeal to me now. I've written before that sometimes it seems like I grew up in a different version of the 50's and 60's and 70's from the one portrayed in the media. I had that feeling big time when I was browsing the many web sites devoted to the baby boom generation. For one thing, the main subjects seemed to be the music, the drug culture, and the Vietnam war. Not much about civil rights or the "women's movement". And what about the bomb? I'm all over the place here, but this is a journal entry not a carefully researched essay. Anyway, I grew up in a racially integrated milieu - unusual for that time and unusual for this time. I grew up steeped in the Catholic Left. I had liberation theology for breakfast with my Cheerios. My Mom hung out with radical feminists who ran a women's bookstore collective before I even knew what "feminism" was. She met these women through the civil rights movement. We had Vietnamese bishops and UFW organizers to tea. It was pretty funny the time my Mom's cat presented this lovely soft-spoken Vietnamese bishop with her cherished pair of dirty socks. It's a wonder all of us didn't turn into raging Buchanan Republicans as a rebellion. This is not to say that I cannot and do not think for myself. I am more politically conservative than my mother and much less religious. I make up my own mind about issues individually and don't hew to any ideological line. And this entry did not start out to be about politics. It started out as an acknowledgement of the date, and a nod to the power of memory and just got out of hand. |
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