Unforgettable...

Tomorrow is the anniversary of one of those days that anyone around 55 and older will never forget. I know I won’t. I was in Mr. Wilsey’s 6th grade classroom when he was called out of the room. When he returned he said, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. He’s dead.”

Of all the classes that Mr. Wilsey took in college I’m sure that none of them prepared him for telling young students that their president had been assassinated. I know my fellow classmates were stunned that day, several cried and we all wondered how something like this could happen in the USA.

I don’t remember leaving school early but the rest of the day was mostly non-existent as to what else I may or may not have learned. Anything of any importance had been shattered with those words from Mr. Wilsey.

As students in the early ‘60s we had seen our share of scary stuff. There was the Cuban missile crisis where we learned to duck and cover underneath a desk. Wow, we actually thought that a desk over our heads would protect us from a nuclear attack.

I remember thinking that we were pretty isolated out in rural eastern Washington but one of our teachers reminded us that Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Larson Air Force Base in Moses Lake (since closed) and Grand Coulee Dam were all possible targets. When he drew a big circle on the area it became a geography lesson I would not soon forget but I sure wanted to.

We saw a lot in the ‘60s and it wasn’t always pretty. I’m not sure if we as students grew up that 22nd day of November but we certainly understood that this was way past duck and cover. If somebody could kill the President of the United States how safe were we?

We survived that day but it took a while for us to feel good about much of anything. We wondered who could have done such a thing and listening to the news and other adults the conspiracy theories were endless and as an impressionable young lad it was confusing but when it started making sense it scared the hell out of me.

After watching some of the TV specials on the Kennedy assassination these past couple of weeks it brought back a lot of those memories and the old conspiracy theories started coming back. With the technology that we have access to today it makes me wonder all the more if more than one person could have been involved and if Lee Harvey Oswald was killed to keep him quiet.

Some of you probably don’t care one way or another because that is all ancient history. Fifty years is not ancient history at all. It was a time where a lot of us lost our innocence and began to question why so many bad things were happening in the world. We were too young to grasp all of it but what we saw made us a little nervous for quite some time. We saw so many things in the days that followed Kennedy’s death because that was all that was on TV.

We would bounce back after a few weeks and we got involved with sports and stuff but we could never shake that moment from our psyche. It was forever etched in our minds and I for one would cringe whenever I heard of another presidential assassination attempt.

I hope we learned from this tragedy in American History.

This type of vigilantism does not solve anyone’s perceived problems it will only make matters much worse. An unforgettable moment in history is still making folks wonder what might have been had President Kennedy not been killed in Dallas 50 years ago tomorrow. Unfortunately we can’t rewrite history and make those changes; we can only be left to wonder.