The Day and Weekend America Was Changed Forever

I drew a blank trying to decide what I should comment about this morning. We all saw what happened with all the news yesterday, both domestic and foreign, and as I told a friend recently when she asked how I come to my topics, I said it has to be interesting to me.

 

Between last night and this morning, I searched all the news apps on my phone and found it all uninspiring.

But then, my commentaries from this day in 2013 and 2015 were in my Facebook page as memories, and suddenly I found my topic. I am sharing them with you here.

They caused me to think about this day in 1963, as a twelve-year-old boy, in seventh grade, living a life with very few issues, other than family, friends, school and church which affected all of us at that time. We were innocent as youngsters, dealing with those issues which mattered most to us.

Suddenly, that innocence was gone, as we all realized our lives were irrevocably changed forever. And instinctively as that day drew to a close, we witnessed the change in our country, as television showed our innocence was lost forever over that terrible weekend.

It rained that Saturday, and we felt the heavens were crying tears of sorrow as we sat glued to the images being displayed to us from our nation’s capital. We wept along with those trying mightily to show strength in adversity, and failed only because they were human.

On Sunday, the day started out better, only because it was a sunny morning. The air was clean and brisk, a typical fall day, as I walked home after serving Mass at my local church.

The priest asked us to say a prayer in memory of our fallen President, and from the altar, all you could here the silence broken only by the sounds of a packed church of two hundred or so people crying as one.

Then we had our Sunday breakfast destroyed by the vision we witnessed from our television. The assassin of our young President was assassinated on live television, with no chance to alter what we just saw.

From that moment, we all knew that Justice would never be served.

We are now adults, and have lived on in a country which was changed that day and that weekend. We know that the America we knew in November, 1963 is gone.

And we are worse off because a man died on November 22, 1963 and America lost its innocence forever. And sadly, so did we.