November, 1963: It still hurts

Seven years ago, I wrote this in about two hours, because there was a lot of anger driving me. I’m not much happier now, but I’m hopeful.

Fifty years ago today, I stayed home sick from school and watched President Kennedy's funeral. First funeral I ever saw.

It was the longest, too.

I remember it surprisingly well, especially the famous salute of his son, John-John. Just like my dad, who was two years younger, Kennedy had a boy and a girl, three years apart, even though his kids were a little younger.

Both men were from the generation that fought World War II, which, along with the Depression, was the dominant experience of my parents' lives.

They never shut up about it.

They were finally getting their moment. They'd put their butts on the line, and now they had a president their age, who was going to help them build a new nation in their vision.

No more old guys running things, purposely terrifying one kind of person about another kind, to keep them away from the trough. No more old guys to get them into wars. No more old guys who thought it was OK for some people to have it easy, and others to have it hard.

They were done with having it hard. Very done.

It didn't matter much that the Kennedys were rich. Everybody looked rich to us, except maybe the lady downstairs, who washed her paper plates.

Kennedy was Catholic, but we didn't care. Most of the old guys who regularly screwed everything up were Protestants. So let a different kind of Christian try.

It's not like a Jew would get a shot. This was the closest thing.

And Kennedy didn't take stuff off of anybody.

Don't want Negroes in your schools? Too bad, I've got an army that'll show you how we do things in America.

And he talked, poetically, with that crazy-cool accent, about things anybody could understand.

Even kids.

And then, all of a sudden, no more young president. That old guy, the guy from the South, was president now.

The South, where they stood in front of the schoolhouses and said No, things will stay just the way they are: Nothing has changed.

We'd been learning in our school about Abraham Lincoln, shot almost 100 years before, by a Southerner who couldn't accept change.

Nothing new. In Life magazine, we read about Medgar Evers shot down in his own driveway, the same day Kennedy had made a civil rights speech on TV.

We'll show you, the old guys said. We've got bullets and dogs, jails and sticks and hoses and stuff. We'll never run out.

And now one of those guys was president.

Funny thing was, Lyndon Johnson pushed through all the civil rights legislation. And Medicare. The Great Society.

But I was stubborn and unfair in those days. I could never picture him really caring about the Kennedy agenda. He just seemed to me to make it happen because he could. Look at me! I can do what the kid always wanted to do, but couldn't have gotten done. Me and the other old guys. We win again.

I couldn’t accept that Johnson might have changed.

But Johnson got us stuck in another war, a bad war, an even crazier war than the one in Korea, which was crazy enough.

And then, of course, the new young people ran Johnson out. And then, the old guys, and the guys the old guys trained, kicked their asses in Chicago, and we were ashamed.

So we wound up with the mean guy in the White House, the same guy Kennedy had shown us was a wacky-old-guy-before-his-time, just eight years before.

Tricky Dick had the rebels and other old guys behind him, and he was fine with big differences between people. The minimum wage didn't budge until the last year of his presidency, as he was leaving in his helicopter.

But I was still young, even if my parents weren't. I knew one day I would get over how all that youthful hope had slipped away, because we'd bring it back.

I danced and sang the night Jimmy Carter was elected. He was a Southerner, but the kind who went to church, and meant it.

But then people who used religion as a weapon, in the Middle East, and this country, too, made sure he didn't succeed. People you wouldn't let sit next to your sister made careers out of making fun of Jimmy Carter on TV.

And the divisions between the people of the world, and between Americans, widened. The commies turned out to be the least of our problems.

A World War II hero named Bush was elected. They called him a wimp. Gone.

Then there was Bill Clinton, a Southerner, but not an old guy. Full of malarkey, but he believed in people living together, and living decently. Grown up poor.

Though he was sometimes wrong, he put us on the right track again. People drew closer, for a little while. Less afraid of each other.

And then he got in trouble. Over sex, which is fun for most people, but which old guys use as a weapon. They impeached him, but he got away.

And then the new old guys snatched victory from defeat in Florida. And they were running things again, prying people away from each other again, getting into a crazy war again.

New tech, and new law treating giant piles of dollars like separate voices in a crowd, helped them institutionalize the politics of scaring people to death about each other. And the old guys got richer, and the bottom dropped out.

But they blamed it on the bottom, and they could sell that, even to some of the bottom-dwellers, because they can bray very loudly now.

So what will keep them rich in the future? They'll think of something.

I was sure, in 1963, that if I lived long enough to be an old guy, I would at least feel comfortable, because then, I would be a part of it.

But nothing looks familiar.

Fifty years have come and gone, and we've regressed. We're a nation of selfish, wacky old coots.

It will take another generation of young people, who won't care how loud a lie is told, because they are the ones who are getting screwed. It will stink for them, but they know, even now, that the old guys aren't on their side.

They're on their own side.

I'm sorry, kids. Every generation fights the same battle over again. And you lose.

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