After an assassination

     "What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?"
            Burt Bacharach "What's it all about, Alfie?" 1965

People my age know about the shock of assassinations. I was in junior high when JFK was killed. 

Grownups talked in hushed voices. The TV showed a funeral procession with people in black. A somber announcer explained the riderless horse. We knew this was special.

Erich Almasy, author of today's guest post, is my age, and a college classmate during the heady days of the late 1960s. We are in a generation that expected to change the world for the better. Blacks were equal, women were liberated, and our brains had opened the doors of perception. We were going to fix everything.

Erich strikes the right tone here in this aftermath of another assassination. The new school shooting in Colorado, within the hour of the murder of Charlie Kirk, doesn't shock us, although it should. School shootings are commonplace, alas. We live with them. But assassinations are different. They are rare enough to surprise. They reflect intention and purpose. Someone killed a political commentator. Someone interposed himself to silence a voice. Assassinations set off chain reactions of responses. Wars start from assassinations. It is reasonable to feel dread. We have seen how things can go very wrong.

Something happened. We are trying to be careful. 

Erich is retired, now living in Mexico.

Almasy

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

No sane person I know would condone the assassination of Charlie Kirk or take pleasure from it. A young man with a young family is gone, and we can only be saddened by this event. The question for me now is not “who did it?” or “why did they do it?” but “what’s next?” 

As we have seen in the Twentieth Century, assassinations tend to change world events radically. Please think of how each of these assassinations caused very negative change: Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and World War I; President Francisco Madero and the Mexican Revolution; Mahatma Gandhi and the Pakistan-India Civil War; Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the resulting rise of the Ayatollahs; Ngô Đình Diệm and the eventual fall of South Vietnam; JFK, MLK, and RFK and the alterations to the American view of itself; Malcolm X and the rise of Black distrust; Egyptian Anwar Sadat and the Mideast Peace process.

I can see how my Boomer generation likely sowed many of the seeds of the divisiveness we see today. Previously, the United States had not been the scene of presidential impeachments, campus unrest, and violent riots. Today, complacent, old, white men from my generation still run our government and own most of our wealth. Even the younger ones act like my generation’s elders, with a Theory X management style, blatant displays of riches, and trophy wives. Gen X, Y, and Z may think they invented social media, but we helped bring gossip columnists to the world.

I look at this era’s gun violence, and I remember growing up with the Marlboro Man. No one gave much thought to the four actors who played him in ads, and that they all died of lung diseases. Instead, we saw them as rugged individualists, always portrayed as cowboys. The Reaganesque (as host of GE Theater, not as president) vision of this man and his horse permeated my childhood with the actual “white” hats faster on the draw than the bad guys. And, since everyone knew the difference between good and evil, it was perfectly all right to use a gun.

Then, we lost our sense of infallibility in Vietnam, white people felt threatened by people of color, and the American Dream dissolved before our eyes. We began to question our uniqueness, and anger that is as old as the American Civil War was resurrected. Can we stop this flow of venom before it overwhelms us? Do we have what Tom Wolfe called “The Right Stuff,” namely, the courage, confidence, and capability to do the right thing? The sane thing? The human thing?

So, I promise myself that I will hesitate before sending a comment or email and ask whether it is a knee-jerk reaction or a proactive, rational response. Am I simply adding to the cacophony and noise? Am I representing the person I want to be? Am I prepared to reap what I sow?

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