This date forever burned in memory
For many of our readers, what happened 50 years ago today – on Nov. 22, 1963 – is forever burned in memory. All of them have a personal story to tell, of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot.
And for some of them, it was not the first time they had been so surprised and shocked and frightened and angered by what they heard, so much so that the horrible moment was frozen and preserved. Those born before about 1935 can recall exactly what they were doing when the news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941 – another solemn anniversary that approaches.
Nearly 60 years later, a third date – Sept. 11, 2001 – would also be indelibly etched.
No other events in American history have had such an impact on every single citizen. Certainly, the country has experienced other momentous days – the firing on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War, and the surrender at Appomattox that ended it, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, just to name a few – but news of these events moved slowly and didn’t reach many Americans for days, or weeks.
The three events in the older reader’s lifetime startled the vast majority of the population instantly via the media. Most Americans were at home listening to programs on their radios on a Sunday afternoon when broadcasts were interrupted by bulletins about the Japanese attack, which was still raging at that moment.
Our youngest readers were not yet born or not old enough to comprehend the 9/11 attacks, but the rest of us were able to watch the horror live on television.
Fifty years ago, television may have been somewhat rudimentary, but the viewing public was fascinated by it, and it was around our sets that families gathered to view the nation’s grief and chaos and deal with their own sorrow and fear.
Though we can all remember where we were and what we were doing during other momentous days, it may be difficult to associate those events with a date. The shock we felt when the space shuttle Challenger exploded can’t be erased from our minds, yet few of us probably tie it to a particular day, or even year. (It was Jan. 28, 1986.)
Americans experienced Dec. 7, Nov. 22 and Sept. 11 simultaneously through news media, and they are unlikely to allow us to forget the significance of those dates. The enormous attention paid to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is a good example of that.
But we are not just tools of the media. Kennedy’s killing is still important to us, and still so difficult to accept.
We could almost sense our world crumbling beneath our feet that November day when we watched on grainy screens in black and white the events that changed the course of world history. Although we cannot imagine how, our lives are much different because of them.
In 1941, what happened forced us into world war. In 2001, we entered a war of a different kind, against shadowy terrorists. And in 1963, for a few terrifying hours after the attack on our nation’s leadership, we imagined the possibility of a nuclear war that might destroy the planet.
Pray that we have no more days like these.