Tears

Maybe the Speaker started something. If men are now allowed to cry in public, the one writing these words have certainly availed himself of this new privilege in the past two weeks. From hearing that Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes and the heroism of so many who allowed her to live, and saved as many lives as possible when her fears were realized and a young man who was so easily able to purchase a gun to kill her, to hearing again the first words I can recall having been spoken as a president was inaugurated, the tears have flown very freely.

They came while praying for Congresswoman Gifford’s recovery, when I heard that the woman who wrote the music to the very words Reform Jews say in those circumstances, herself died of the pneumonia which resulted from a too brief lifetime filled with illness. They came when watching others sing songs of praise to that woman, Debbie Friedman, and then a few days later, when watching fourth graders in Washington D.C. read the famous words spoken there by Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr, in the summer of 1963. And it is completely impossible to stay dry eyed as the nation listened again the words that first entered the unformed mind of an eight year old who has felt for every minute since then the need to fulfill the President’s command that he ask what he can do for his country.

It was the first civil event which remains in my memory bank. I saw it because school was cancelled by the northeastern snow storm that day and there was nothing else on television. Much of what President Kennedy said that day meant nothing to me, but some it hit home in an unformed mind where its words, repeated so many times since then, are fully etched today.

The speech itself has been quoted under this name so many times, it seems pointless to do so in any great length here. The NBC News coverage anchored, of course, by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley has been posted for some time and is well worth the hour plus it takes to watch.

That coverage could cause a tear or two to be shed because of how long gone that hopeful time seems to be. A recent book about the speech by Thurston Clarke is fascinating particularly in what it says about President Kennedy himself and how foreign his approach to the speech, much less the presidency itself, is to today’s way of thinking (or of avoiding thought).

Celebrating November 22

Monday is November 22. That month with that date next to it always appears as dark, sad, searingly so. It is the date which needs no explanation to almost anyone who lived through it and, amazingly, of little significance to everyone else. It is the date on which Everything Changed.

People who missed the brief Kennedy administration often think that those of us whose political awakening took place then tend to romanticize the era or the President. Others feel that by discussing his personal failures or even a few political ones, they can bring a perspective to the period that many of us are said to deny.

Both miss the point. What the Kennedy administration means are not its accomplishments, though there were many, including the prevention of nuclear annihilation. Is there anyone who thinks that the Cuban missile crisis would have ended the way it did had Richard Nixon been seated in the White House in October, 1962?