Meeting Our Emotional Needs About JFK

THE WEEKEND THAT KENNEDY WAS SHOT, I cut out every article in the local newspaper which had anything to do with the event, and by Sunday night I had what I thought was a pretty good scrap book, of which I was very proud. I couldn't wait to show it to my father. When I did, he looked at it for a split second and brushed it away. He obviously didn't want to see it. He hung his head an brushed away a tear, and I began to realize I had done something very wrong. I was very disappointed. I guess I wanted him to praise me and compliment me on my good work, like a school project getting an A grade. Eight yeras old was a stange age to be when JFK was assassinatied, because you were, I was, just barely old enough to understand what was going on, but not experienced enough in life to react to it properly. I reacted to it as if it were the most exciting thing in the world. Neither positive nor negative, merely....exciting. If I had been a couple of years older, I think I would have understood the insensitivity of the scrapbook. A couple of years younger, I would have understood nothing. I was the wrong age, the scrapbook age. As the weekend, which included the funeral Monday, passed, it must have slowly dawned on me the absolute nightmarishness of the event. I recall that was indeed the case. Then I spent most of the next fifty years convinced that any or all of the various conspiracy theories was correct. Anything Oliver Stone came up with, I was good to go. I begin to feel now as if another fog has cleared from my mind, the fifty year conspiracy fog. Just another emotional denial on my part. First, I failed, as an eight year old, to realize that a tragedy had occured, then, as the years passed, I failed to realize that I was inventing, along with millions of other people, an elaborate mythology to accompany it, presumably to meet my emotional needs. It looks like about seventy percent of the American people are still clinging to belief in the elaborate conspiracy. My, the things we do to meet our emotional needs!