47 years ago today, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I wonder what he would have thought about the world we live in today.
We've conquered one of his goals: putting a man on the moon, and we got a lot of benefits from the technology used to get there. I'm alive because of the space race. During my cardiac surgery, vital signs were monitored and I was kept alive using machines which evolved from the instruments developed for the space race.
We have the Internet and cable and satellite TV which President Kennedy never envisioned. The Internet has given a forum for every crackpot who couldn't accept the simple fact that a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to murder our young, vital president.
We went through Vietnam, a war which he may have avoided. We fought that war supposedly to stem the tide of communism from the Domino Effect. The left scoffed at the idea but after Reagan and Gorbachev shook hands and thawed the Cold War, most of the old Soviet satellite states fell one by one.
I grew up in the age of air-raid drills. Those dirty commies had the bomb! The 50s and 60s weren't that far removed from the Blitz in London and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. (In those days, we had a longer memory and history wasn't dismissed by the young.) I remember being ushered into the hallway and sitting hunched over with my face towards the wall. Thank goodness we never had to practice that in real life, because now that I know a little bit about the nuclear bomb, the toll would be greater than just those who perished in the blast.
We don't fear the Russians any more. When the Cold War ended, I remember being told by a friend who studied world politics that the real enemy of the West was Islam. I had only a vague notion of what Islam was then but I do now.
Instead of the Khruschev pounding his shoe at the U.N., now we have to listen to an religious fanatic hiding in a cave, brought to us in living color and sound via cheap and readily available video recorders; again, an evolution from the space program. And while we don't have to cower with our heads covered any more, if we decide we're going to fly anywhere, we have to subject ourselves to an examination which under any other circumstance would be deemed criminal sexual assault.
There is one critical difference. We didn't finance the Soviet war machine. Today, our SUVs and air conditioning suck up massive oceans of petroleum, much of which we buy from states which if they don't openly support the fundamentalist terrorists, they give them sanctuary.
In JFK's day, politics was fought by the Marquis of Queensbury's Rules. One side energetically disagreed with the other, but the level of discourse was civilized and at the end of the day, everyone laughed and joked over cocktails. Kennedy was friends with his prospective opponent for 1964, Senator Goldwater, and they talked about becoming a latter-day Lincoln and Douglas, barnstorming the country sharing the same jet, appearing together at the same venues to give the American electorate something to think about.
Today, politics is a celebration of hate, or the very least, disdain. Liberals regard conservatives as fascists and idiots; conservatives view liberals as socialists who pander to their constituencies.
In those days, science was looked upon with optimism. Polio was vanquished and surely cancer would be next. Today science is looked up with distrust. Extremists refuse to vaccinate their children. Global warming is a idiological tug-of-war instead of being a calm scientific debate. Recent public opinion polls show nearly half the populace believe the Earth is just 10,000 years old!
When Kennedy was alive, the wealthy looked upon politics as public service. Kennedys and Rockefellers went into politics like a swarm of bees. They served in state houses and Congress, and of course, the White House. The last member of the Kennedy clan is retiring from Congress this session. It's the end of Camelot.
If he was alive today, JFK would be 93. Journalists wouldn't hide his secrets; they'd proudly expose them. Long ago he would have been revealed as a womanizer, his lovers selling their stories to the tabloids.
I don't remember a lot about my life before Kennedy was assassinated. But in some ways it was the best time of my life. I wonder if that wasn't true for the country as a whole.
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