Every Generation Has Its Innocence Assassinated

I remember November 22, 1963. Just two days earlier, I celebrated my 12th birthday. We lived in New Orleans as my father attended the Baptist Bible Institute, preparing for the pastorate. We lived with the families of many other pastors-to-be in student housing. I will never forget the look on my mom’s face: red swollen eyes, furrowed brow, and handkerchief in hand, as she came to retrieve me from my sandlot football game with my fellow PKs in waiting. She pulled her sweater tight against the rapidly dropping temperature and damp north wind that clipped across Lake Pontchartrain. I instinctively knew something was wrong. I could have never fathomed how wrong.

Her face and the faces of the other adults I saw over the next few days is what I remember the most. Those hollow stares gave gravity to the events that would ultimately change the direction of a nation, yea a world, for the rest of my life.

Before that fateful November day, our country seemed somehow younger and more optimistic. This charming and articulate young president elected at only 43 seemed the right man to lead the WWII generation into the prosperity for which postwar America was destined. But, as three rapid shots rang out in Dallas, that man became frozen in time at the age of 46.

Our parents’ generation seemed to age before our eyes, unable or unwilling to move forward with the zeal and excitement they processed in the days of Camelot. Like a car shifted into neutral, they collectively lost their forward motion, their bright-

eyed assurance of a positive improving future, and at least for a moment, settled back with a long sigh and rested. Their optimism was replaced with cynicism. Their dreams of what could be were dashed on the jagged rock of what was.

We boomers in our youth, as youth always seem to do, began to look to our future with a bit less trust for the world that our parents and grandparents prepared to hand to us. Stained at least somewhat by the fact that a single man with a $20 mail-order rifle could change our world forever, we lost at least a bit of trust, and we rebelled.

We rebelled against much of what our parents’ world came packaged with—against their morals,

their wars, their clothes and music, and even their values. We felt we somehow knew better and learned “not to trust anyone over 30.” As we chanted defiantly, “Hell, no, we won’t go,” our hair grew longer and our patience shorter. Ozzie and Harriet were packed away with Camelot, as we stepped into the love-the-one-you’re-with era, clad in our generation’s uniform of the day: bellbottom jeans, beads, and flowers in our hair. We had it all figured out.

That innocence remained intact until the JFK assassination for our generation—9/11—stole the same optimistic excitement that Oswald’s three quick shots stole from our parents.

All this happened in only 50 very short years.

At Your Service

Richard Parker