Crossposted from Docudharma.
I was eleven in ’63...when they killed John Kennedy. That was the end of my innocence, and the end of America’s too.
I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedys?"
When after all
It was you and me
Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil
I was twelve in ’64 when they murdered the Freedom Summer Workers in Mississippi.
I was sixteen in ’68 when they killed Dr. King and John’s brother Bobby.
I was 17 in ’69 when we gathered at Woodstock seeking peace and solace from an uncaring world. Our peers were dying like flies in a bogus war in Vietnam, which our government and society treated as the cost of doing business.
We stood up against the forces of darkness in the 60s but were defeated when most people failed to stand up with us. If we had all stood up then we’d have different and happier stories to tell now.
I was eighteen in ’70 when I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the West. To realize that you’ve been fed a steady diet of systematic lies when all along you believed yourself to be a free citizen of a nation that was a force for good in the world is a heartbreaking epiphany.
"The Indians ... have at least one distinct impression regarding the
government. They know that it never keeps its word. Any old chief will tell
you that white men are all liars."
Frederic Remington, artist and war correspondent
The truth is hard to face.
In my youth it was the truth of racial and social justice, and the truth of Vietnam.
The truth is hard to face.
"I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a 'nigger'. "
Muhammad Ali
The truth is heartbreaking.
The truth of Gettysburg, My Lai and Haditha.
The truth of Wounded Knee, Kent State and Selma.
The truth of Dallas, Memphis and Birmingham.
The truth of Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Brentwood.
We all let them do it, so we’re a part of it. Having done it, we let them get away with it, and again we are all a part of it. If these crimes go unaccounted for, we are all guilty.
The fault is ours, we who watched it happen. All those who were quiet in the face of fascism. All those who for whatever reasons failed to stop them. All of us good Germans.
We all wade in the blood of innocents.
So don’t ask who killed the Kennedys, because after all...it was you and me.
Afterword: Am I trying to tear America down with pieces like this? No, that work has already been done. I am trying to get America to face itself in the mirror so that it might become what it was meant to be.