Traumatic memory...November 22, 1963....

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Saturday November 22, 2008 · 7:01 AM PST

2008/11/22 · 07:01

That's a psychological term that describes the ability to remember an event or incident from the past that was so intense and impactful that years later the memory traces of it are immediately recoverable.

Such an event occurred for me and tens of millions of others around the world exactly forty-five years ago today, November 22, 1963. This was the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

I was seventeen years old on a beautiful fall day in 1963, when my father came running up the stairs to our apartment shouting: "Turn on the TV, turn on the TV". That was how I learned of John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. The following three days are etched in my mind. I saw the Christmas windows at Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale's, and Lord & Taylor's and those of all the other retailers both great and small covered in dark drapes and single windows devoted to the memory of the slain president. I watched in disbelief as Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live television. And I saw my father cry for the first time in my life.

And now in 2008 as we await the inauguration of our first black president, the stir of echoes grows more intense and more profound. We have likened Barack Obama to both Kennedy and to Lincoln. Obama with his youthfulness and exuberant charisma hearkens back to the young JFK whose election signaled that the "torch has been passed to a new generation". And like Kennedy, Obama faces enormous problems both at home and abroad. As for the comparison to Lincoln, Obama faces a nation divided; not by threats of secession and war, but by the same prejudices and ideologies that threatened the Union some one hundred twenty-eight years ago.

So we should pause today, and remember both those two former presidents and hope and pray that Barack Obama will be blessed with the same success and greatness of his two predecessors. And we should also hope and pray that whatever Divinity you believe in will protect him.

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