A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION PART 30

I remember this day 50 years ago.  I was young and in grade school, but it made an indelible impression.  President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas while on a campaign trip.  I've seen all the horrific images and read lots of the theories about why that ghastly event occurred and wondered how things might have been different had JFK lived to serve a second term.

I'm not naive enough to think we would have enjoyed utopia.  We had problems in the New Frontier just as we've had problems since.  But there was an excitement and an idealism during the Kennedy years that have never existed since.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, JFK called on the better angels of our nature.  Our major purpose in life wasn't to be drones in some soul killing job or be consumers or feast on stories about the rich and famous.  It was about a higher commitment to our country and to our planet.

Stephen King wrote a very good time travel novel called 11/22/63 that I consider one of the best books I've read about the Kennedy years.  I didn't care for the ending, but the rest of the book is absorbing.  Lots of things were worse in the early 60's than they are now, but lots of things were better too.  I guess the strongest emotion I feel from that time was hope and hope has retired now to some other place.  Now it's just about muddling through day to day and wondering what the latest outrage will be.

More to come