The global repercussions of it long ago ceased to matter.
Our collective fate? Anything short of Armageddon, I'll accept with little fuss and a shrug of resignation.
Every night this week, we're lectured in somber, sanctimonious tones by TV's keepers of the national conscience on how America Was Changed Forever On That Terrible Day. This is true. And I don't much care anymore. We are a nation in love with our own suffering, and four decades of self-righteous repetition turns even unassailable truth into trite cliché.
What genuinely troubles me about my untroubled world view is the unshakable cynicism—in case you hadn't already noticed—from which it springs.
And my suspicion that, while the trait evolves from many strands that overlap in a life to make us who we are—from small, intimate moments to enormous national traumas to good old-fashioned genetics—a prime culprit crossed my path 40 years ago. An accident of timing that yanked a late-'50s-born child out of a bubble-wrapped, Rockwellian dreamscape and into the combative, angry America of the '60s.
The America that formed me.
While regretting the tragedy that triggered it, mobs of my peers from the mid-to-late baby boom would thank God for such timing. But God will have to give me a pass on this one.
More than I mourn John F. Kennedy, more than I mourn what my country might have been, I mourn the abandonment of the essential me. The optimistic, expectant, non-cynical me I always believed I was in my heart—and deep down, pray I still am, buried beneath the baggage of the 1960s.
Every child comes to learn that there is a world beyond what they can immediately see and hear and touch. That discovery should be gradual. Occasionally, it's swift. On November 22, 1963, it was drastic.
I was 6.
Sent home early from school. … Why? … Cronkite, "the announcement, apparently official, President Kennedy died, approximately one hour ago." … Everywhere, on all three networks, all seven channels … Mom, sprawled on the floor, sobbing, desperately clutching a bookcase like a buoy in the wind-whipped Atlantic, as if letting go will sweep her away in her tears. … People everywhere, people I know, people I don't know, people who don't know each other, streaming out of apartments, clinging together in the halls, a mournful mass of humanity … Casket in the rotunda … Drumbeat, procession, little John-John, cute salute. … Eternal flame. … An era over. … President Lyndon Baines Johnson. …
"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did'ja kill today?"
Body bags on television.
A friend to his parents: "When I'm 18, will I have to die?"
Bobby's dead. So is Rev. King.
A young relative after learning his uncle had passed away: "Who shot him?"
Every generation reveals its arrogance in the self-reverential recollections of its tragedies—Kennedy-era baby boomers most arrogantly of all.
What brand of suffering, we smugly tell ourselves, could be as meaningful as ours? What could those of you on either side of "The '60s" (our slavish devotion to our deified past demands quotation marks) have survived that compares with our singular catastrophe, our Camelot in ruins? What could possibly leave you as emotionally scarred, as psychologically toughened, as wise as we?
I acknowledge the arrogance, but can't quite separate from the self-pity that spawns it. I cop to a selfish outrage—that I was robbed of a sunnier perspective on the world around me by JFK's assassination and the chaotic '60s that came crashing down in its wake.
At age 6, I was ushered into an America of Vietnam and soldiers spat upon, civil-rights clashes and black citizens attacked by police dogs, political breakdown and rioters in Chicago, assassinations and Kent State—an America distrusting itself, hating itself, at war with itself.
Too young to be included (that free-love thing looked like fun from the sidelines). Too old to feign ignorance. Just old enough to feel irrelevant, witnessing a country break loose from its moorings—with no firsthand sense that America wasn't always in self-destruct, that generations weren't always so bitterly divided, that ideological flamethrowers weren't always preferred over reasoned debate, that the conventions of society in which we were schooled weren't always held in such contempt, that authority wasn't always suspect, that confusion and vitriol and acrimony weren't always the norm.
I respect my parent's generation—not only for outlasting a depression and a world war, but for weathering them shoulder to shoulder, a nation united, even under severe circumstances. I admired the immigrants of my grandparents' day, in all their ethnic shadings, for enduring the hardships of the early 1900s as tightly-knit, committed communities. I even envy the children of September 11, who—despite the emotional brutalization of growing up with the horrific daily threat of instant annihilation at the neighborhood pizza joint—are being raised in a nation largely allied against fundamentalist madmen, even though a controversial president occupies the White House.
The '60s were many things, most of them contradictory. Convulsive and vibrant. Angry and inspiring. Divisive and communal.
The memories, searing and sweet.
But as an adult—stepping back, measuring my life, distanced from the emotional rush that hurtled the era into history—I cannot cherish the legacy of my '60s childhood. Beyond the decade's delirium and social catharsis, its lingering residue still saddens me.
Though reared in a stable household, I came of age in a culture of mounting distrust that exploded into contempt. The '60s were a breeding ground for the cynicism that haunts me still, a stubborn skepticism toward people and their motives that, while never hardening into despair, has yet to soften into hope.
Gazing at the world, at its hubris and hysteria, its senseless death and unfathomable fanatacism, I find myself asking no more than the containment of horror—that the absence of pain is the best we can reasonably expect. Malevolence is a given, the immovable common denominator, the world's permanent fungus. And nursing any notions of widespread benevolence smacks of quaint naivete.
Optimists must justify their optimism to me. And there isn't a day I don't scold myself for my doggedly downcast, compulsively arch attitude—especially when I sense an innate hopefulness struggling to poke through my protective emotional armor.
I recognize my own ironic contradiction: I am a born optimist who can't escape his learned pessimism. A cynic who despises his cynicism.
I've been one for 40 years.
Since November 22, 1963.