Tonight we saw On the Town with Tom and Barbara. We got seats in the very last row, so for the second act, in order to see anything, Barbara and I sat on the edges of our folded-up seats. It was either that or get a permanent twist in my neck.
Barbara and Tom and Buck (my husband) were all in high school when JFK was shot — so much for my own small memories. Theirs are much clearer, and they didn’t go into them at all. Twas a given.
One factor, I believe, that makes JFK’s assassination stand out so much in our collective consciousness is that it was our first completely shared tragedy. Before television, there was not such a sense of immediacy — visual news, and this was televised, hits so much harder than print or verbal news, even if still pictures accompany the stories. I don’t believe that, during and after the Pearl Harbor attack, people in other parts of the country felt as though they were actually there. One had to wait for a day or so for the pictures to come through on the front pages of papers.
Now, we have several… Kent State, the Challenger explosion, Reagan’s (attempted) assasination, and the granddaddy of them all, 9/11. It’s a method of collective time-telling. Touchstones, common reference points that hold us together as a modern culture. What else but a great tragedy can make us all stop at once?
white pebble 