Today..... 50 years after the death of JFK

Today, November 22, 2013 is the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy

“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights--the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation--the right to breathe air as nature provided it--the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

We shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on.

President John F. Kennedy

Full text and video here.

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I was only 8 years old when JFK was shot.  I remember seeing a women openly crying as I walked home from school. I remember my mother and siblings and I kneeling in a circle and praying that he would live, and immediately afterwards hearing that he had died. (Rather reinforced the idea that praying like that did not work.) And a couple of days later, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in the chest. It was live on my television.  That was the first live murder I ever saw, but it did not really impress me at the time - I did not understand what had happened, really.  I went and told my mother that "somebody shot the man who shot the President" and she said "no, they didn't".  But I was correct.  Oswald was shot and killed.

And there is still something very, very rotten about the murder of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.