Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy. Fifty years ago. Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess. Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything. It's my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t alive when JFK was shot to death in Dallas. That they have no idea what mattered and what the story was.
They don’t know what they’re talking about.
Virtually every person conscious that day, November 22, 1963, every one of us remembers where he or she was when they heard. Exactly. I was in an English class at college. The class ended abruptly. Silent except for the sound of people crying.
There are not many moments where most of the people on this planet share an experience. Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation was like that, I gather. Surely 9-11 and the planes flying into the Towers. It is the electric minute, all of us with our fingers in the same plug, horrible and thrilling. If you are young now, and you imagine telling your offspring one day about 9-11, do you think you will talk about the conspiracy or the terrorists or some guy reading a children’s book to a kindergarden class? I’m guessing not, rather that you’ll tell your children where you were and what you felt when you heard. I’m predicting that what will stick over the next years is that instant of awful connection, of the burst of impossible information, that bite of the god-like fruit of pure knowledge, of suddenly, involuntarily knowing something you do not know how to know.