Fifty Years Ago…
Fifty years ago I was ten years old. The year 1968 was confusing, chaotic, terrifying. I was in fourth grade at the start of the year, and despite my tender age wasn’t ignorant of what was happening in the news. Turning on the network news every night, Walter Cronkite told us about our boys getting killed in Vietnam, cities on fire from “race riots,” the political and social and racial chaos that threatened to tear our nation apart. Earlier in the year I’d read about Dr. Martin Luther King and the protests he led; in April the news told us how he’d been assassinated in Memphis. Everyone expected a summer of riots and violence; I remember my parents discussing whether we lived far enough out from the inner city to avoid the rioting they knew were coming.
I actually wrote and published a newspaper for my class at school that year; I remember writing a story about the Indiana primary, which Bobby Kennedy won. I was a bit of a political junkie, even back then, and I remember waking up the morning of June 5th, turning on the radio to hear the results of the California primary. They didn’t learn the results till near midnite in California, 3:00 a.m. Indiana time, long after I’d gone to bed. I expected to hear that Kennedy had won the primary (he was expected to), but instead heard that he’d been shot. Shot in the head, in a hotel kitchen, by some guy with a foreign name. He wasn’t dead, not yet, but was in a coma. He wasn’t expected to pull through.
I followed the news all day, waiting to hear more. Bobby Kennedy was the great hope for millions of Americans, young Americans especially, promising an end to the violence and fighting and hunger and hatred that was rampaging through America and around the world. Bobby could stop it all, we knew it. He would carry on his late brother’s legacy. And now he’d been shot. It was devastating.
That evening we had a cookout at my aunt and uncle’s house. I remember my little brother and sister playing in the back yard while my uncle and my dad cooked burgers and hot dogs on the grill. I stayed inside, reading the afternoon Indianapolis News that had just been delivered, the one with a picture of Kennedy on the front page, lying in a pool of blood. I kept waiting, hoping for some sort of miracle, but there was none to come. Bobby Kennedy passed away the next day.
On top of everything else that had happened that year, Kennedy’s death made it fell like the entire world was going to explode. It didn’t get any better as the days and months went by, with the violent Democratic convention in Chicago, the cities on fire across the nation, the vicious election fight, the continuing war in Vietnam — every day, every night was frightening, especially to a ten year-old. I have not experienced anything quite as scary in all my years since, at least until this year with Trump and his seemingly calculated efforts to destroy our country’s democracy and upend the world order. It’s not quite like 1968 yet, but it’s getting there.
I entered fifth grade in the fall of 1968, not knowing how or whether our world would survive. But then, at the end of December, the very end of that chaotic year, something happened that calmed us all down a little. NASA sent a small spacecraft carrying three brave men out into space, all the way to the moon. The crew of Apollo 8 were the first humans to leave Earth orbit, and the first to orbit the moon. Given the primitive technology of the time, we didn’t know if they’d make it there or if they’d make it back. They did, and that simple but impressive feat united the entire world, at least for a brief moment.
I remember watching the black and white images on TV, seeing the Earth as a small, bright circle in the darkness of space, and realizing — along with hundreds of millions of others — how small we all were, sharing a ride through the cosmos on that little orb. On Christmas Eve the astronauts of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders — put it all in perspective by reading the first ten verses of Genesis:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
And, for a moment at least, the world, with all of its simmering conflicts, was at peace. We all caught our collective breaths, and took in Frank Borman’s final words from lunar orbit:
“From the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
All of us on the good Earth had made it through that horrible, eventful year. And we’d make it through more. It took a few years and a lot more deaths, but the Vietnam War eventually ended, the riots died down, and we learned to live together as a nation again. There were further conflicts, of course, and more confusion and always, always more hatred, but we survive. We’ll probably survive Trump too, and whomever comes after him. That’s what we do as humans, we survive. Somehow, we make it through. So even though I truly believe the world would have been a different, better place had Bobby Kennedy lived, we made it through without him. Fifty years it’s been and I hope and pray we’ll make it through fifty more, so that my grandchildren can tell their grandchildren what the world was like when they were ten years old, and how horrible it all was, and how they made it through.
RIP Bobby.
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