Forty-two years ago today, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I'm not sure what percentage of America's population remembers that day, but those of us who do probably remember it more vividly than almost any other day in our lives.
Living through that day and the half-decade of assassinations that followed (Malcolm, Martin, Bobby) is impossible to describe to anyone who didn't. The 60s have been painted over with a rosy coat of nostalgia (a nice antidote to existenial anxiety) and an overglaze of marketing imagery (to help us to continue to believe that we've still "got it").
But the horror of the violence we experienced is lost. Watching young leader after young leader gunned down by innocuous-looking representatives of faceless reactionary forces (Oswald/Ruby, three Nation of Islam assassins, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan) led to a strong undercurrent of fear and even greater despair. It was as if the old order was saying, "change, in whatever form you can imagine it, isn't going to happen. The old order will prevail."
That was not the case, of course. Powerful changes did happen, the pinnacle being the decentralization of power itself. This part of the "revolution," in which those who previously had no voice now speak on equal footing with the rich and powerful, is still in its early days. But it is connected with the historical themes that fueled Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If you read John Markhoff's terrific book on the history of the personal computer, What The Dormouse Said, you hear this theme playing out again and again (in the words of the Chi Lites): "For God's sake, you got to give more power to the people." And, as it turned out, it was Silicon Valley, perhaps even more than Washington, D.C., that ended up putting real power into the hands of Sly's "everyday people."
And that's where we are today. At a place where unknown people can express themselves and make their mark without killing the symbols of the new order. In fact, those unknown people themselves have become the symbols of the new order.
Creativity: the most powerful revolutionary tool ever created.
Tags: Kennedy Assassination
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