Asking For It

Observing the celebration and commemoration of Ted Kennedy's life and death, one cannot help but notice a sense of unease rising up from the inside. It reminds us of the ways in which his brothers sought to change America and were cut down for it. Today's fiery political climate, far less civil than it was even in the radical Sixties, validates that sense of concern.

Everyone already knows how Phoenix was bristling with firearms at town-hall meetings and anti-Obama rallies. Fewer know about a Baptist "pastor", name of Steven Anderson, who preaches from his Tempe pulpit that our president "ought to be aborted". (Imagine that... A pro-choice Baptist.)

The assassination of John F. Kennedy, followed by the obvious Warren Commission whitewash, left a good and decent America in psychological tatters. As this happened a few years before my time, I had a very big question for my parents about this as soon as it passed through my academic transom.

Why? I kept asking. Why did you let them get away with it? The only way they could answer my question was with one of their own. "What," they asked me, "were we supposed to do?"

And that makes sense. My father was working on a professorial career at the time. My mother was an immigrant-bride from New Zealand. They had two baby girls. They had just lived through the McCarthy era, when the government viewed the most innocent of citizens with considerable suspicion. There was nothing they could do but accept it and move on.

It was a matter of faith, to be sure, for them to have three more children (the last one in 1974) after that. But barely four months after I was born, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. I'm sure my folks wondered what kind of world it would be for us kids.

President Obama has received a four-fold increase over past presidents when it comes to death threats. Four=hundred percent. Some of it is fueled by racism; most of it is the result of ceaseless political jingoism from right-wing media. Conservative rage today makes the tenor of the 1960s seem as though it belongs in an elementary schoolyard.

This sudden knotting up of the past and the present makes me wonder about the future in very specific terms. It appears likely that, sooner or later, an attempt will be made on Barack Obama's life. This is the path of the mindless world-view that has been created for this nation's new true minority.

This is not my Dad's America, and I am not my Dad. I don't have a career; I have a job, and no kids to interfere with my decision. More than that, I was brought up with an understanding of American history that he came to know in real time. I asked this question of my father, so it's only fair now to ask it of myself:

If the worst parts of said history recreate themselves today, what am I going to do? Like my father, I can only answer that question with another one, Dear Reader.

What do you think I'm going to do.

pH 8.31.o9