Sixty-two Years Ago

There aren’t too many of us left who actually remember that awful day, November 22, 1963. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had been shot. I was standing at the front of a classroom of second graders, when my supervising teacher, Mrs. Masters, took me just outside the door and quietly told me that the President had been shot.

My first reaction was disbelief. No! This could not be happening here in the United States of America. Surely, there was some mistake. Surely we’d soon hear that he was alive, that the news had been wrong. But no, it wasn’t wrong and so began days and weeks of mourning in America.

Years have passed since President Kennedy’s assassination. Many other acts of violence have shaken our nation. I wonder why. Have terror and murder and lawlessness ever settled anything? I think not. Instead, they seem to have just led to more of the same, with nothing settled, only a lot of grief, torn lives, and lawlessness following in their wake.