This Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Naturally it’s all over the media. There are tv specials all over the place, and I admit that I’m interested. Not fanatically, but I do find it intriguing. There was an article in Monday’s Washington Post about a special that would be on that night. I watched the show and it was mostly various people talking about their reaction to JFK’s death. That’s fine. My issue with the article is this:
Was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a greater shock than the assassination of President Kennedy? Perhaps not, on the grounds that you can lose your innocence only once -- have it ground with a black boot into dust only one first time. Everything that follows is, no matter how horrendous, by definition anticlimax.
Okay, we know that the baby boomers, as a generation, are incredibly self-centered. But to say that JFK’s assassination was when America lost its innocence and was therefore a greater shock than 9/11? No. No, no, no. First of all, that implies that earlier events, such as the Civil War or the attack on Pearl Harbor, hadn’t had that much of an impact. Which is wrong. Just because it happened while the boomers were in their vital development stage does not make it more shocking, more influential than the things that came before. And while JFK’s death was horrible, well, before September 11, I would’ve had a much easier time believing that someone would kill our president that I would believing that people would hijack planes and crash them into skyscrapers. Anticlimax? Excuse me?
Posted by Barb at November 19, 2003 09:32 AM | TrackBack