Fifty Years Ago

There is something about seeing 2013 written which has been disturbing me. The numbers unsettle me. I realized that this is the year I turn 63, which might be unsettling except that I have been reminded that I have been telling people I was 63 since my last birthday. That isn’t what bothers me.

The number 63 does seem to be needling me in another way. In 1963, I turned 13 and became a teenager. Being a teenager was a big deal. My baby boom generation was driving the advertising world and much media and marketing was focused on us.

Becoming a teenager was treated as a threshold, as if there was something we had done other than surviving for the required number of years. It was entry into legitimacy for American Bandstand and dances and more complicated relationships with the opposite sex. I happily looked forward to my adventures . . . racing to leave my childhood behind. In October, teen-age was achieved and I marveled at how much I felt the same, though now I was legitimate. I carried my new pedigree proudly strutting with the others.

Most of my classmates had already marked that achievement and as an October baby, I was trying to catch up. Parkmead Intermediate School was an ocean of newly anointed teens. I remember being in shop class just a month later when there was an unexpected announcement on the fuzzy speaker on the wall. Suddenly we were listening to the radio coming over the speaker and a man was saying that the president had been shot. I was stunned! I remember that moment even now . . . the color of the wall . . . the high windows with their silver colored handles . . . the shock . . . the following days of mourning in front of the black and white television. The shooting of Oswald . . . the funeral procession and the pain and deep depression of the nation.

I realize now what the numbers have been bringing back to me. My subconscious has done the math and knows that it has been 50 years. Fifty years of believing that the government did not tell us the truth. Fifty years of thinking that it will all surely come out. The cement cannot hold back the grass forever . . . can it?

I know that a large percentage of the United States population does not believe that the report done by the Warren Commission investigating the killing of John F. Kennedy is the truth. According to polls nearly 80% of us are disbelievers. It is difficult to find anything that many of us agree on. That is a large number of people who believe our government has lied to us. In 1979, the House Committee reinvestigating the assassination found that there was indeed a conspiracy and that there were at least two people shooting at Kennedy.

We waited and . . . nothing happened. We are trained that way. We wait for someone else to do what must be done. If no one does anything . . . we accept that. We are trained to allow the media to tell us if something is important. If they don’t pay attention to it, it must not be important. If the source of information can be controlled it is easy to control the thinking of a society like ours. Meanwhile, information and disinformation battle it out on the bookshelves.

This former teenager is saying 50 years is far too long for us to live a lie. Let us no longer pretend that our country had good cause to lie to us about something so significant. We have shown how capable we are of pretending. I am ashamed at my own lack of action and words. I am embarrassed to look in the eyes of the youth of today and say that my generation . . . the class of 68 . . . which was supposed to save the world . . . just went along. We followed those before us and lead those behind us.

Five years later in 1968, there were more lessons to come for us. We learned to keep our heads down and that if you were someone who could make a difference you will be destroyed. I hope that enough time may have passed that those who have come after us will have sense not to follow our lead. We cannot be trusted. You do not want to go down the path that we are walking. Let us use this 50 year anniversary to prepare for the anniversaries to come; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and the others who were killed to prevent them from challenging what they saw as unacceptable. They spoke for us! It is now time for us to speak for them!

San Benito County is known as a bellwether county in our state. As goes San Benito, so goes California. It is my dream that we will begin a wave here that will grow to include the entire country. As we move towards November 22, 2013, the anniversary of the killing of our President, let us encourage others to face the truth.

Many of the perpetrators are no longer living though a few may be. Let us focus, not upon punishment for the guilty, for we are all a bit guilty to have allowed this to be un-addressed, but to find out what did happen. Did powers wishing to change the direction of our country choose to murder rather than to go through the political process? What is the truth of November 22, 1963, and the past 50 years? Who has benefited? What else died with JFK?

Anyone else wanting to know?

In San Juan . . . we wave!