60th Anniversay of the JFK Assassination.

Shot down like a dog in the street.

A dozen or so students climbed two flights of stairs between levels of the Buhl, Idaho Junior High School. Just an ordinary fall day. Suddenly someone leaped up the stairs from below, two at a time, and rushed up “the President has been shot!” Two months short of 14 years old, I looked out the window across the grassy athletic field with the realization that the nearest TV — there was none in the school — would be the little black-and-white at our pin-ball hangout, the Dairy Queen a couple of blocks from the back of the field. We ran down the stairs, out of the school, and across the field to the DQ.

Time stopped, the figurative curtain of the temple was torn, life in the USA was never the same.

That’s how we remember it — those of us who were alive then. There is before the assassination and there’s after it.

Watch some of the newsreels and films of the aftermath. If anything, they underestimate the sorrow and shock felt in the country. Literally millions wept openly. Ask yourself honestly, would the nation express that kind of searing grief for any president today?

Thanks to Abraham Zapruder, we know that President Kennedy literally had his brains blown out of his head. But does anyone remember now how many years passed before the public was able to see the film? 1969 … and it wasn’t the original. Life Magazine and the government both admitted long ago that it was edited and frames omitted.

From the mid-1970s through the early 2000s, an astounding 74% to 81% of Americans believed the murder of the president was a plot. Americans today agree on NOTHING with that kind of unanimity. That number has fallen in recent years roughly equivalent to the mortality of the men and women who were alive at the time. Covid killed them off by the hundreds of thousands. The figure is about 65% today. My parents’ generation are among that number — they are both 94 years old this year. My generation, twenty years younger, will be the last old enough to witness, digest, comprehend, and remember it.

Every poll shows that general trust in the government began its decline about the time of the Warren Report. Certainly other disastrous lies, military adventures, and scandals have contributed to the erosion, not least the Viet Nam War. But trust in government has dropped steadily since the 1960s. By 2023 it has reached historic lows with just 1% saying they trust Washington to do the right thing “just about always” and 15% “most of the time.” Based on my own observations, those figures seem optimistic. Certainly the Pew Poll from which they are drawn was taken before the latest Gaza disaster; with its spectacle of an American president, his cabinet, and nearly the entire media class working overtime to rationalize hospital-bombing and ethnic cleansing streamed around the world. Zionism is untouchable. Criticism is default anti-Semitism. “Isreal has the right to defend itself.” Wait ! What !?! The occupier is defending itself from the occupied ? That means Nazi Germany had the “right” to defend itself from the French? World turned upside down.

Meanwhile on page six of the newspaper, the counter-attack of the Ukrainian “defenders of democracy” has ground to a complete stop without the capture of a single square meter of land. Russia is again on its careful, methodical advance. The US and EU are secretly reaching out to a skeptical Russia. Zelensky is looking at his Switzerland and Miami options. The MSM is silent or lying; rarely if ever the truth.

America is getting what it has earned. When you murder, maim, and displace hundreds of thousands across the planet — well then, there is a price to pay. And that is exactly what the USA has done since November 22, 1963. Practice saying “blowback” because there will be more.

And if a country murders its most vital and talented leadership, well then … it is doomed to be led by ill-intentioned, incompetent dodderers or emotionally crippled narcissists. And you have a CHOICE which one to vote for.

When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.

RIP 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. We will never forgive and we will never forget.