Hey, Blonde, if you’re from Dallas of course you have some extra interest in the event. Guess what - I’m not from Dallas and I’ve never been there. Do I care what happens in Dallas? Yes, actually I do. I wish nothing bad to happen to anyone in Dallas, I want the city to be prosperous, I want the schools to be good and the neighborhoods safe.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I care more about where I live, the Chicago area. Why? Because that’s where I live.
You were condescending. In fact, I wrote a big nasty ol’ reply I’m going to dump in the bit bucket because you did have the grace to apologize.
You want to know something that pisses me off? This pseudo-hysteria around this time of year every year is a gore-fest. Want to recognize JFK? Fine - celebrate his life, not his death. I am sick to death of seeing a man shot in the head and his brains splattering on his wife.
You know what? You’re right - I don’t care to watch a man being killed. There’s a certain sickness to playing the tape over and over and over. I would, however, be happy to watch MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech about a million times more than I already have.
So why don’t we celebrate JFK’s BIRTH rather than his DEATH? Why don’t we see him making the “Ask not what your country can do for you… ask what you can do for your country” speech every year? Tell me why we don’t celebrate how this man struggled to overcome his physical ills rather than dwell on his shattered skull.
Lincoln was assasinated - but we don’t obsess about how he died every year although arguably his assasination was even MORE shocking to the country than JFK’s. No - we talk mostly about what Lincoln DID. Frankly, that IS why JFK has lost some of his luster - why DOESN’T your generation talk about what he accomplished if he’s such a great man?
The saddest thing about the whole JFK/Camelot myth to me is what it did to JFK, Jr. - his whole life this man was expected to live up to his father’s legend - when even his own father didn’t live up to the “legend”. All my life I heard people talk about this kid like he was some reincarnation of his father, about how he was going to grow up and carry on the family “legacy” and do great things. He spent his whole life chased by papparazzi not for anything HE ever did but, basically, because his father was shot in the head while in public office. What a sad, sick burden to put on a child/young man. All that talk about when - not if but when - he was going to go into politics and take up the old man’s mantle, as if his whole life was just a prelude to running for public office and becoming his father, as if nothing he ever did in life would ever matter as much as him simply being his father’s son… Know what? I don’t think Jr. ever had any desire to hold office - why should he? What did it ever bring his family but blood and death? How dare other people expect him to be his father, to live his life to appease their desires. I’m just surprised he didn’t run off to some remote location where he could live his life on his own terms without being hounded by folks who just won’t let go of that “shining moment”.
The best damn send-up of the whole messy affair I ever saw was in the last season of Red Dwarf. I laughed my ass off. I doubt that episode will ever be aired here in the States, it throws egg on too many of the sacred cows in this country, but it does make the point that there is no guarantee that he would have been good for the country had he not been killed.
I’ll say it again - the deaths of 30 and wounding of 400+ in Istanbul should have been at the top of the CNN website this week, not a 40 year old assasination. There is something fucked up when a so-called “news” agency ignores the present in favor of a past event four decades old. Just as there was something fucked up about headlining that Michael Jackson fiasco rather than what’s happening in the world - but at least the MJ bullshit was current events, even if media generated stupidity.
But, I am going to bring up one more quote from you, Blonde:
Well, gee, why fuck do I bother to write if you don’t read it. I told you in my first post that I was born two years after JFK’s assasination, which, if you exert a tiny bit of mental effort, will tell you the year of my birth. You don’t have to “assume”, you just have to read. I’m not that much younger than YOU, Blonde, less than three years. Ask yourself how you came to regard someone born so soon after yourself in the same category as your children. My opinion doesn’t come from being young, uneducated, or ignorant. I’m tired of being condescended too MERELY because I was born in '65 rather than '63.
I’ll tell you, though - the opinions of the 18 year olds is just as important and valid as yours or mine. They ARE going to assign different weight and value to events than you or I. That’s the way of the world, and of history. There will be a generation that doesn’t remember 9/11, too, and will never feel the pain we felt that day. That doesn’t make those future people wrong, ignorant, angry, or somehow disrespectful of history. They’ll be much more concerned with their present and future than with their past. That’s OK with me. In fact, it’s the way it should be.
