The Innocence of My Youth

Fifty years ago Friday I was in the third grade. (Yes I know, it's hard to believe that someone so youthful and vibrant as myself has been around that long, but it's true.) It was also a Friday.

I attended Lafayette El- ementary School in West Seattle and our class was in a "portable;" one of those trailers they park in the play- ground. Mrs. Young was our teacher, and she looked shocked that day - though she didn't cry - when some- one came in the room and handed her a piece of paper saying the president had been shot.

I remember that it was a very strange weekend, especially when we went to church on Sunday and learned that the guy who shot the president had himself been shot. I also remember watching a lot of somber black-and-white TV.

It was strange times, too. A little more than a year earlier - during the Cuban Missile Crisis - our parents had told us there was a pretty good chance we would end up in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. We lived close to where Boeing made bombers, so we were almost certainly in one of the prime target zones, we were told. I was seven.

In school we had special air raid exercises during which we climbed under- neath our desks. We wore little cards around our necks with our names written on them. These were to identify us after the attack, I guess.

A few years later, about the time I got to junior high school, the Vietnam War heated up. Every few weeks in the Vancouver newspaper (our family had moved there by then) we read about a local boy, usually just a few years older than me, who had been killed in the war. One young man who had at- tended our church was killed in Vietnam and my father, who was the pastor, had to go to his parents' house to meet with them.

The war ended soon af- ter I turned 18, and things seemed to be a little more peaceful after that.

I bring you this little outpouring of nostalgia of course, because we've reached the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Presi- dent Kennedy. So it's all over the news again.

But it's also gotten me to thinking about the news it- self. I read almost every day about the many catastrophes that are threatening to befall our country. Obamacare is going to destroy our country, some people say. The gun culture is going to destroy our country, say others. Maybe it'll be drugs and crime. Or maybe it'll be the greedy corporations.

Sometimes it amuses me to read all those dire predictions, because, put in per- spective, things aren't all that bad. None of those horrible threats could possibly destroy our country in the way the nuclear war we almost had would have destroyed our country. And as difficult as the military entanglements we've been involved in the last dozen years or so have been, they've been nothing like the Southeast Asian war we fought back then, in which 2.7 million American military personnel served, and more than 58,000 were killed. (I looked it up.)

I've read lately that many scholars now think President Kennedy was a weak presi- dent, whose bungling got us into a lot of these problems in the first place. A lot of people used to think he was a great president and that he would have avoided some of the biggest problems we had later, had he lived.

Either way, his assassina- tion was the greatest national trauma of a very traumatic era. And I can still remem- ber, at the tender age of seven, riding my bike around our West Seattle neighbor- hood, imagining what it would be like if it were com- pletely flattened.