I guess this is something I can’t quite conceptualize, being born in 1975, but was the world really that “innocent” back then? Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, threat of nuclear annhililation, McCarthyism, Korean War, etc.
It’s hard to explain. I don’t mean that nothing bad ever happened–after all, we had just had two world wars. And “innocent” isn’t the right word to express what I’m trying to express. There was the lurking threat of The Bomb that my generation of children was raised with. The Cuban Missile Crisis was definitely a scary thing–but the threat was a potential, a hypothetical. McCarthyism was over by the mid-1960s. The Korean War was also over.
Earlier generations had lived through horrors, but for my generation (the earliest Boomers) the Kennedy assassination was the shattering of a world that felt mostly safe. The rest of the 60s completed the destruction of that somewhat idyllic bubble–the Civil Rights movement with the violence that accompanied it. (Don’t get me wrong: LBJ opened a can of worms, but it had to be done.) Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. Martin Luther King’s assassination. The 1968 Democratic Convention. Kent State. The increasing disgust with the VietNam War with the demonstrations. The nightly reports on the news about the men killed over there-- 58,000+ in all. All of that came AFTER JFK’s death.
As kids and teenagers, we were not exposed to 24/7 horrors like terrorism, beheadings, mass murders in schools, things that penetrated your daily life like warnings to throw away all of your lettuce because of e.coli. There wasn’t a barrage of horrific news all day, all the time, on TV, on your phone, on your computer (no personal computers). Today when you get up and look at the news, you are bombarded with tragedies, atrocities, one after the other, each one worse than the last. And you’re bombarded all day every day. The 1950s and early 1960s were not like that.
Maybe some other old farts around here can help me explain this.
I understand that it must be hard to imagine that. I have a hard time remembering it sometimes…
It had also been a long time since a US President had been assasinated. From Lincoln to Garfield to McKinley was only 36 years, then there were 62 years until JFK. As a third grader I don’t remember if I was really aware of the first three yet, but the murder of a president was shocking.
To be honest, that’s similar to how I remember the 80s. I felt mostly safe. Reagan was a paternal figure to me, and made me feel safe as a kid (which if I had more understanding and maturity, perhaps I would not have thought the same way, but that’s undeniably the way he came across to me and my friends in elementary school.) The main horrors hanging over my head were the threat of nuclear annihilation (which was actually starting to ebb at the time) and the AIDS crisis was scary with all the misinformation floating about. Other than that, my childhood also felt pretty secure and worry-free, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps its the sanitizing qualities of memory.
I do sometimes wonder what it’s like for kids to grow up in this generation, with 24hr access to all sorts of information, good and bad, and ubiquitous media fearmongering.
I know all those dates.
Another day I remember is Jan 28. Jan 28 1986 specifically. It was the day of the Challenger accident and would have been my mother’s birthday, who died suddenly the previous summer.
Not a whole lot of presidents are considered for coins and paper money…these days more dirty laundry is exposed about famous people so no one cares to memorialize them.
How much longer will it be that 9/11 will be forgotten or not learned by a generation after us are gone?
If I see or hear the date November 22nd I will know what it means, but if you asked me on any random day throughout the year “on what date did JFK get shot?” I wouldn’t know, except that it was late November.
But I can remember almost every moment of that day. Sirens went off(it was a local public elementary school, but adjacent to an Army base). My teacher was called to the office over the loudspeaker, and then some kids ducked under their desks thinking it was “the bomb”. When my teacher returned her face was streaked with tears and she had trouble getting out the words “Children, our president is dead”. She then sat at her desk and couldn’t control her tears for a while. After a moment of multiple raised hands trying to get her attention for further explanation(kids were polite back then), there was open talk in class and lots of wild speculation - from a hunting accident to the Russians shooting down his plane. Someone started praying, beginning with the Our Father, and that calmed everyone down and we all stood and joined in. After the third Hail Mary our teacher asked everyone to sit quietly and wait for the buses or our mothers to arrive and take us home - school was over for the day.
and how would you feel if President Trump was shot and killed?
Believe it or not I’d be pissed. I despise Trump, I feel he’s the worst POTUS ever. If he had a stroke, or a heart attack, and died, I’d dance on his grave.
But for someone to murder him, well, that’s an attack on the office as well, and that I couldn’t abide.
Honestly, before Stephen King’s novel came out if you asked me when JFK died I wouldn’t have been able to answer.
I think August 6, 1945 should be engraved on everyone’s memory.
I teach United States history at a university. My modern US history course spends time on FDR and on World War II, as well as on the Kennedy presidency. I can talk at length about a whole raft of historical issues, domestic and foreign, related to those two events.
And yet, if you had asked me an hour ago to name the exact date that Kennedy was assassinated, or the exact date of Pearl Harbor, I might have got it wrong. I probably would have been correct on Pearl Harbor, but for Kennedy, I might have been off by a few days. I know it’s late November, but the specific date doesn’t really stick in my head.
One thing we try to do, in university-level history classes, is push against the idea that history is mainly about remembering a bunch of Important Dates. I don’t give a flying fuck if my students forget the exact day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, or that Kennedy was assassinated. I’m far more interested in their understanding of why those events were significant, what their main consequences were, and how they fit into a broader understanding of American history.
Unfortunately, I think that, too often, the “commemoration” culture in America (and so many other countries) tends to prioritize token date fetishization rather than actual historical understanding.
Back when I was in the 9th grade, on Nov 7th, my English teacher (first class of the day) asked the relevancy of the “today’s date”. {{{Crickets}}}. He was astounded that no one remembered that was the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. :dubious:
November 7th, huh? I can see why he taught English and not History…
For the record, on the Gen X/Y cusp and know the significance of all those dates. I was a history major and I’m generally good with dates but, in saying that, I’ve known those dates since I was a kid as I have always had an interest in the world before I was born (except 9/11, of course, as I was an adult by then and remember it well). The 21st century is actually more of a blur to me than anything in the 20th. The '90s feels like it was just a couple weeks ago.
1954 kid. For me, there is and always will be a grey sky and a chill over November 22, no matter what the actual weather.
My circle of acquaintances is heavily skewed towards classical music scholars, so what first comes to mind with reference to November 22 seems to be evenly divided between the JFK assassination and Saint Cecilia’s Day / Benjamin Britten’s birthday. But very few of them would qualify as Millennials or X’ers.
Even though I am a history aficionado, if asked I would place the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, but I couldn’t give the precise date. I was born sometime afterwards.
September 11 will always be significant to me, I would guess.
I was born in 1964 and was fetal at the time of JFK’s assassination. For some reason, I always think the date was the 23rd and am a little surprised it was the 22nd.
JFK’s assassination happened 11 years before I was born, so it doesn’t have any personal impact for me.
But… I live in Dallas, so every Nov 22nd mention of the assassination is in the newspaper and on the TV news for some reason or another- This year, it was an article saying it was the 55th anniversary, and an article about how police officer JD Tippit’s widow was getting the run-around about getting a grave next to his in a cemetery around here.
I was 4 days past 5 years old when Kennedy was shot, and I had no idea what the significance of the title of the post was. I doubt any of my kids would do better.
In their defense, do you know the dates of the Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley assassinations were?
Without needing to look it up, Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.
Don’t know about Garfield and McKinley. McKinley was shot >52 years before I was born. If you were born >52 years after Kennedy was shot, you would be a bit young for posting here. 