Remembrance and Realization
November 22nd
There are many poignancies that accompany our remembrances on this day. For me, the one that always rises first is the sound of choking sobs that came from my father; a staunch republican and no fan of JFK, he was utterly undone by the assassination. He’d wept quiet tears when his mother died, but this degree of emotion from him was new and shocking. To be sure, the whole nation wept for days on end.
But it was a different time, and that realization has been forcefully driven home over the last few years. Of many changes that have taken place, perhaps the saddest is the increasingly grotesque deterioration of the party that had held my father’s allegiance. Indeed, had today’s republican party been extant in 1963, Dad would have left in disgust. It’s not at all likely that they would have shared the common grief. Based entirely on their own words of hate, accompanied by their actions of massive disrespect that often verge on outright treason, it’s far more likely that they would have danced in the streets.
And that realization is heartbreaking.
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