New World: Post JFK/Post 9-11

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was hoping some SDopers could tell us how they saw their world change due to the assasination of JFK. Did you, personally feel the world had been forever changed? Likewise, did you get similar feelings on (or thereabout) 9/11/01?

I wasn’t born yet when JFK was Pres. Everyone repeatedly has told me how they felt the world changed - pointing to that event as a benchmark, perhaps, to life before and after. Being too young to know any other world, I couldn’t comprehend this. Now, with the events of 9/11/01, I could feel what they meant. I’d say this feeling came over me within 24 hrs of the massive loss…once the shock factor had faded into a realization that this was reality, and not some bad dream.

Hope some SD baby boomers (and others) will join in…

  • Jinx
2

I was but an infant when they took out JFK, but from what my parents and others told me, they way they felt was similar to what I feel today: that an exciting, progressive new frontier got the rug yanked out from under it by the rich old white man military/big business/spook ilk (I’m referring to the aftermath, not the events themselves) and that life just got unfun fast and that they (the M/BB/S ilk) wouldn’t ever let us have progressive leadership again. JFK dead>>Vietnam, 9/11>>WWIII over a few pissants in the middle east…

3

I lived through both, and it wasn’t the same think. It was a shock that he was killed and difficult to believe a single madman could do it, but it was a single event, a single death, and it didn’t have the ramifications.

On September 11, it was an act of organized madness. It was much more like Pearl Harbor than JFK.

4

I don’t feel as you do. In the first eight months of 2001, I didn’t see any exciting, progressive new frontier. We started the year without an official President-elect. When the verdict finally came down, the new administration struggled to establish itself, and there was a lot of pressure on the cabinet members to prove their worth, because so few people had faith in Dubya.

Big business didn’t pull out the rug after 9/11; they had the rug pulled out from them. Corruptions were finally exposed, and the economy started cracking. If by “spooks” you mean espionage and national security, they’re the ones who dropped the ball before the attacks. The military is not in Afghanistan for show; they’re there because we had to accept that challenge.

I won’t dispute your projection of a possible WWIII. But (and I guess this would come under the heading of “Forbidden thoughts about 9/11”) my reaction after the shock wore off was that this was what we got for being so placid and not taking jagoffs like OBL seriously. If 9/11 turns out to be what it took for us to get our heads out of the sand, maybe 3000+ people won’t have died in vain.

5

I was 12 when Kennedy was killed. To me personally, that seems to have been much more of a watershed, a change of mentality, than 9/11. But part of this could be because, with hindsight, we know (or can imagine) some of the ramifications of JFK’s assassination, while we as yet have little idea what the more far-reaching results of 9/11 might be.

In 1963, the US was upbeat. There were problems, but we felt we could resolve them. We would beat those damn Russkies. The colored (as they were then known) were making great strides. Eventually poverty would be beaten.

JFK’s murder was a blow straight to the heart of America. It shook our confidence and self-image. But its impact seemed to become even greater as time went on, as RFK and MLK were also killed, the ghettos erupted, and the Vietnam War spiralled out of control.

In back of all this there was the feeling of “What if?” Maybe if Kennedy had survived, he wouldn’t have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. Maybe, with his charisma, he could have calmed the ghettos. Nixon would never have gotten near the White House. This may all be just wishful thinking, but we’ll never know.

Also, I think there was the feeling that somehow, we did it to ourselves. Although Oswald was a commie, he was also an American. As the Stones said, “I shouted out “Who killed the Kennedys?” when after all, it was you and me.”

9/11 instead is like Pearl Harbor, in that we were attacked by outsiders. While it shakes our sense of security, it doesn’t, I think, shake our self-confidence, and our image of who we are as a nation, quite as much as the Kennedy assassination did.

The ultimate significance of 9/11 won’t be known for decades. If the War in Iraq becomes a debacle, if the US economy continues to spiral downward, if nuclear war erupts in the Mideast or between India and Pakistan partly as a result, it will be seen as much more significant than if those things don’t happen.

6

Actually, the whole thing is pretty tedious. Americans keep yapping about how they lost their innocence, which they seem to do every 15 years or so.

WW2: lost innocence.
Cuban Missile Crisis: lost innocence.
JFK assasination: LI
Vietnam, Watergate, Challenger, WTC: etc.

As far as I can tell, Canadians lost our innocence in World War One, and we’ve been grownups ever since.