November 22, 2019

Fifty-six years ago today, President Kennedy was assassinated. I was in a high school in a predominately Republican town. They didn’t even let us out early once we got the news. We had to try to stay focused on school work until we could get home and sit in front of the TV to find out the details of what had happened. I was a teenager and I had no thoughts of politics or what was going on in Washington D.C., however, an assassination of a beloved political figure was earth shaking. Kennedy was the first of the triumvirate of killings that would change the way all our lives would unfold, whether we cared for politics or not. Next was Dr. Martin Luther King and in the same year, 1968, Robert Kennedy.

Their photos, clustered together, hold a place of honour in many American households, signifying dreams to be fulfilled and promises to be kept, by lesser mortals. Another voice had been silenced earlier. It was a voice that was harsh and bitter, but spoke a painful Truth that many turned away from. Malcolm X had been murdered in 1965, just as his renewed understanding of Islam while on Hajj in Mecca led him to moderate his speech and seek a broader consensus. We can’t know what would be different had those men lived, but it is clear that the quality of life of everyday people is critically impacted by the decisions of the small minority of people who hold the majority of private wealth and by those hold political office and decide how to spend the public wealth collected through taxes. With greed rampant and the distribution of wealth way out of kilter, ordinary people are realizing that there is strength and power in unified action to claim our fair share of Nature’s bounty.