11/22/63: Saturday Political Soap Box 79

I was in third grade.

The teacher announced that the President had been shot, and that we were going home for the day. I didn't quite understand what was going on, except many of the older people around me were sad and worried. When we got off the school bus, an eighth grade girl had to have a high school boy on each side of her, as she cried and was so grief stricken she could hardly move. We went to my grandparent's lake house, and I remember being upset that my cartoons were disrupted by coverage, including the assassination of Oswald by Jack Ruby. It wasn't until years later that I learned how awful the events were, and how much they changed American history, mostly for the worst.

Yes, most likely for the worst, as it triggered a chain of negative events that led eventually to the escalation in Vietnam, the rise of Nixon and Watergate and the dissolution of trust in government, to Reagan and his yanking our nation sharply rightward shattering our dream that our country could do great things, to George Bush the Junior who took this nation to it's lowest point in decades (ruining our foreign policy and the lives of hundreds of thousands with the Iraq War, increasing the debt to massive proportions by cutting taxes to the wealthy and other 'unfunded' mandates and wars, bringing this nation and virtually in the entire world to the brink of financial ruin, ignoring climate change to the point that now it is almost certainly too late, and I could go on and on and on, but either you get the point or you don't), to where we are dealing with TeaPartyAmerika (a wholly owned subsidiary of RepubliCorp) which is a group that does not mind sacrificing lives, democracy, and financial stability in order to get their way.

I love alternate history, and both writers and historians have wide disagreement on what the effect of Kennedy not being assassinated would have had.  Some think it would have meant little.  I have heard reasonable arguments, for example, that it would have slowed progress on civil rights, that some legislative successes were actually fueled by our impulses to fulfill his agenda and by LBJ being a southerner and able to pull enough southerners along to accomplish things more quickly.  Others insist that our course in Vietnam was cooked so hard that JFK would have gone down the same path.  And others note that his alleged affairs would not have survived an era of greater scrutiny.

I don't know.  We can never know.  But I like to think the best.

Throughout my four years at University of Michigan I received As and Bs except for one course.  I got a C in European History.  I went to war with a graduate assistant and I lost.  She was a socialist and believed economics was the sole determinant of the course of history.  I believed in the Great Man Theory of History, and did my paper on how Oliver Cromwell influenced the course of British history, in ways that defied simple economic analysis.  She was not pleased.

So forgive my indulgence and insistence that great men can make a difference.

That had Kennedy lived history would have taken a different course, that at least Vietnam would not have occurred so disastrously.

That had Martin Luther King lived he might have led us closer to the realization the civil rights and economic justice were intertwined.

That had Robert Kennedy lived a coalition of poor and middle class whites combined with African Americans and Latinos would have altered our history enough so that we might no longer be a divided nation.  I firmly believe, with every fiber of my soul, that the assassination of RFK was the  biggest game changer in American history.

Reagan made a difference in that he turned the nation more sharply right than it had any intention of going.  He accelerated the division between rich and poor, a snowball that has continued to grow to the present day.

Obama, like Lincoln, has tried to heal us and bring us together, restore some progressivity and balance to our country.  There are bitter and hateful forces aligned against him that have made it difficult for him.

But those forces have always existed in our country.  They were there in JFK's time as well.  People who hated him intensely and, although they may not have participated directly in it, their hatred fueled the atmosphere that made his assassination more likely.

May the flames of hatred eventually be cooled.

I don't want our country to go through it again.  One day like 11/22/63 is one day too many.