Fifty years ago, I was sitting in a high school geometry class in Montreal when the intercom came on, piping in a live radio report that John F. Kennedy had been shot. The same thing had happened a little more than a year before, when the intercom and radio informed us that Russian warships had turned back from Cuba.
On that October day, I walked to the bus stop, not knowing if I would come home in the afternoon. But at least I had some context for the first announcement. On November 22nd, there was no context. I got off the bus and walked home. My mother had turned on the TV. We watched as Walter Cronkite -- obviously shaken -- confirmed Kennedy's death.
Death on television was common in my youth. But Jack Webb and Richard Boone always made sure that justice was done in the space of thirty minutes. This was a new world.
For many of my generation, the Kennedy assassination marked our loss of innocence. We learned the meaning of an abstract concept -- injustice. And we learned that the world could change in eight seconds -- the time it took for Lee Harvey Oswald to fire those three shots.
This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.
We'll be in Toronto for a couple of days. I hope to be back on Monday.
4 comments:
I remember the day well, we at our elementary/junior high school grades 1-9, were sent into the gymnasium to watch President Kennedy get the top of his head blown off. We were immediately ushered into the world of 'double-speak.' The Warren Comission was the first taste and a complete sham just as the 911 event was, as it was orchestrated from planning to the sham 911 Commission which was staged to. usher in the 'brave new world' of endless war, the war on terror. The Bush admin through various military supply chains etc made fortunes on the ensuing conflicts. Larry Silverstein the Jew boy in the mix made out like a high scale heist man. He was going to have to remove all the asbestos at the. World Trade Center complex of which there was allot of. So much in fact that he had come to the conclution that it would be cheaper to do a controlled demolition of the twin towers and rebuild from scratch. He got his wish courtesy of the Bush admin and he did it with George W. Bush's' favorite item, OPM (other peoples money.) funny how he knew the Bush admin would allow the so called hijacked jets free passage on that fate full day. He even reinsured the complex against, gasp, a terror attack six weeks prior to 911 and tripled the payout in the event of such an attack, nice foresight Larry. An asbestos abatement was what Larry was in for to bring the building up to code, but he knee better and banked on a fictciuos act of terror to implode the buildings for him, highly dubious indeed. We have. all been subliminaly trained to recognize 911 to be the emergency number and that's where we are now in a constant state of emergency. Look at how the G-8 Summit was handled in Toronto far from ground-zero.
Mogs, a former builder who can't be fooled when it comes to the over the top costs of asbestos abatement (removal). And I know a controlled demolition when I see one I've seen quite a few in my time.
Larry Silverstein may have been less than honest, Mogs. But I'm sure it wasn't because he was Jewish -- just as I'm sure that Stephen Harper's tendency to dodge the truth has nothing to do with the fact that some of his ancestors came from Scotland.
“the time it took for Lee Harvey Oswald to fire those three shots”
I don't believe Oswald was the shooter. Wrong weapon for Oswald from that vantage-point and wrong trajectory from the Zabruder film. Even from the grassy knoll, the Mannlicher would suck, and Oswald as a qualified Marine marksman, would have known that, and for another six to ten dollars could have got an M1 Garand semi-auto from the mail-order house, which is almost identical to the M-14 he got his marksman badge with. With the M-1 you get 8 30-06 rounds and because it's a semi-auto, you don't have to take your eye out of the scope field, unlike the Mannlicher bolt-action.
And when you're gunning for #1 . . .
I suspect that we'll never know if there was more than one shooter, Ed. When Jack Ruby disposed of Oswald, he made it impossible to know the full story -- and the conspiracy theories began.
Without certainty, the injustice lingers.
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