WHEN INDIVIDUALS GO BEYOND THEMSELVES
by John Majka
Gradually the balls stopped bouncing in the gym. The group of young men was shocked into silence. We couldn’t imagine what to do next. The President was shot in Dallas and was now pronounced dead. JFK was brutally assassinated and we were faced with rethinking how hopeful we had been about the future, how safe and carefree college life had seemed to be. We had been sheltered from the mean streets and the dark alleys. Now in the November Texas sun a light had gone out that we had come to rely on, taken for granted. I didn’t weep, probably because I was too young to have made such a deep commitment to one person’s vision, but I did feel abandoned. A profile in courage had fallen and we found ourselves adrift and unguarded.
The Kennedy aura has flourished for all these years despite the fact that in many ways JFK has been demythologized. When his affairs, even in the White House, became revealed, many people were devastated, especially my mother. She wanted to believe that JFK was somebody above the rest, a Catholic president in the full sense of the term. Catholic was not just a private belief for her. It was a way of life. She had so admired him. That absolute disappointment was much harder to take than his death. I could feel her pain, because I had to admit that one of my heroes was flawed and I wished I didn’t have to do so. I tried to console us both by reminding her of something she always said: God writes with crooked lines. The good JFK achieved was not obliterated by his private sins. In the end all ends well.
I had begun college that fall. Anxious to learn all I could to be able to contribute to the making of a new world, a new world order, based on equal rights and access and the generous sharing of gifts: very much Kennedy’s message, his political dream. At that moment, however, I was drained, stunned. Nothing made sense during the time it took to realize what had happened and what the consequences might be. Throughout the following days we spent practically the entire time following the events that were constantly being replayed, reinterpreted and unfolding. It was as riveting as it was moving. Oswald was caught and killed. The funeral procession continued on Pennsylvania Avenue toward Arlington Cemetery.
The decade ended with astronauts on the moon, youth unrest throughout the world, more assassinations, and the burning of several large cities, but I was not to be deterred. Along with many of my friends and coworkers I came to the conclusion that if something was going to change for the better it would have to start with each one of us individually and together. Peace had to begin with me and I would strive for justice to achieve it. Kennedy’s spirit, to some extent at least, was behind this optimism. He was a forger of the age of the 60’s as much as its product. The 70’s and 80’s would bear that out. We knew it.
But then, the Vietnam War never seemed to end. Family, friends, veterans returned from the front beaten and unaccepted, political pawns in a fight that lost its moral base and political will. The soldiers took the unjustified brunt of rejection of the war by the people. When it finally did end, as the USA had to concede defeat, there was Watergate, the pardon, the hostage crisis, hippies became yuppies and gradually thanks to Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Gorbachev, the Cold War ended. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall brought back a reminder of Kennedy’s widely applauded phrase in 1961: “Ich bin Berliner!”
In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the devil tries to manipulate potential subjects into a completely secular view of life’s meaning, as if life were only what we have here and that there be no higher force, no God, no personal belief system. Cynicism is the way out for non-believers. Nothing makes sense to them. Nothing means anything to them. Their god is the absurd. For Lewis and many of us, such thinking is delusional, because we perceive something beyond us, a logic that transcends our experiences. We know ourselves as more than a compilation of body and mind, emotions and motivations, memories and abilities.
The official white house portrait of JFK,
by Aaron Shikler.
We embody a yearning for the transcendent that fires our hearts and imaginations.
Fifty-three years later President John F. Kennedy is still remembered and revered. The testimonials and the celebrations show the legacy of JFK’s death as the need to give meaning that goes beyond a particular event or person. More than ever, around the world, we are forced to admit that political change only happens when individuals go beyond themselves, striving for ideals that benefit all humanity and the planet we live on.
Kennedy is most remembered, perhaps, because he challenged what was then to become something more. That spirit is basic to the human spirit—the restlessness that moves forward into an uncertain future, knowing that others have opened the door to the possibility of a different, better world, however weak, however flawed, however inconsistent they may have been.
I am not thankful for how John F. Kennedy died, and not even for how he lived actually, but I am thankful that for so many the memory of his life and death could provide the platform for hope and continuity. No matter the cost, we must continue that good fight.