(#5232) Through an older man's eyes

      I hear people talking about the past of which I have lived. It makes me a bit nostalgic to hear their interpretation of what happened in events that interest them and for the most part their interpretation is at least fundamental. Yet having been there I know that a two dimensional understanding of things not experienced comes up short in how it really was. So the memories come flooding in like the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Nowadays that event is not taught as a pivotal event in the history of our nation but let me tell you it was. There would have been no tricky dick nixon to have been tolerated. The Vietnam War would have been over in the sixties not the seventies.
     I remember just how crushed I was when Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968 on the heels of MLK being killed just months earlier. Plus the vivid stunning event of President John Kennedy being assassinated in 1963. What those events did to us who supported and admired these men was crush our souls like nothing that has happened since. We were young ideologues who knew that the change we were waiting for to happen would now be lost. Our moment in time had passed us with those assassins bullets. What we got instead was a continuation of the hopeless leadership that had promised to stamp out the idea that all were created equal and that the rights of humans individually weren't safeguarded.
     Our hope for a better America and a better world was done in by the forces that would not stand by and let us progress. There were too many who had power and did not want to relinquish it. So killing our hope was too enticing for them not to allow. My generation of baby boomers could well have been a shining metal force in the world but instead we were forged into a lesser metal that now is part of the structure that those who destroyed our hope have shaped. Well not all of us baby boomers dropped our heads and followed where told. Some, and probably more than that, of us have been waiting for a second chance at tremendous change and possibly now we can start to feel that original hope again.