AWFUL MOMENTS

I’ve essentially turned off my television for the next week.  The new Time Magazine showed up in my mailbox today with the all-too-familiar picture of a Dallas motorcade on the cover.  It will be everywhere for the next seven days.  There are two such searing events in the lives of most of us, three for those of our parents’ generation, and each is burned into us in such a way as to become part of who we are.  This post appears in both my personal and my political blogs because of this duality, a national experience personally shared and experienced.

I first began to feel old when a group of co-workers and I were exchanging reminiscences of where we were that November day when the news came, and a bright young thing piped up: “I hadn’t been born yet”.  And in my mind I thought: ‘really, it’s been that long?’  I do, of course, remember that day with some embarrassment since I made some smart-assed remark to the first kid to stick his head in the 10^th grade geometry class window to say: “the president’s been shot”.  In my defense, none of us could believe the news at first, but I, always quick with the least appropriate statement, said something like: “who, Lincoln?”

Anyway, I still cannot view that Dallas footage, and so I’m giving up TV for a week, just as I do for the week after Labor Day each year, and as our parents do around the first week of December.  I can’t even look at the weather channel since I’m sure they’re planning a special on why good weather led to Kennedy’s shooting.  Even one of my favorite escapist TV shows – Bones – did an episode on the assassination once.

One of the main reasons I can’t watch is that I can’t take the barrage of ‘experts’, each claiming they’ve proven some conspiracy theory: there were two assassins; Roosevelt knew the Japanese were coming; the CIA/mob/Cubans killed Kennedy; Bush and Condoleezza Rice knew what the hijackers were planning, and so on.  In my mind, these wild-eyed fame-chasers are just a subset of our polarized, screaming society, where tables are being pounded and spittle is flying on every channel, from all sides of the political spectrum, on TV or You-Tube, and each has a more horrible allegation regarding his opponent than the next.

So now, especially now, by all the Gods you profess to believe in, can you all please just SHUT UP!