By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“If a man has not found something worth dying for, he is not fit to live.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
November’s speeding right along. The Pea Patch is uncommonly cold after what seems like a twenty-minute cursory nod to Fall. Indian summer was held hostage by the weather gods this year, no ransom announced, and now the trees are bare-boned once again, rising above a dense carpet of fading leaves. Coming late this year, Thanksgiving is right around the corner. For me, that brings another birthday to add to my collection and as always, images — from fifty years ago today — that are fused into my memory.
I want to write about that period in history — not that you haven’t had your fill in these last days, I suspect — but not about who did the shooting, or why. For me, and surely for many of you, the remembrance is highly personal, an indelible scar on the psyche of an impressionable young generation soon to be known as Boomers. It seems a moment so private in our sorrow, so sensory that it still brings sharp pangs of anxiety and quick tears, that to write about it in a logical fashion seems somehow to demean it. It has been called — and was — a moment when, literally, everything changed.
I don’t want to minimize anyone’s feelings by being that smarty-pants who says you had to have been there, but really, to get the full impact, you did. To get a real sense that the nation was stunned to its core, you had to be there and realize that even such a dramatic description as that is inadequate. The nation was, and in vital ways remains, heartsick.