On Assassination

On Assassination

November 24, 1963

My first memory, ever, is a hazy image of John F. Kennedy’s casket lying in state in the rotunda of the US Capitol building… I can remember seeing the sunlight (or spotlights, not sure on that) shining down on an American flag.

I was a year and three months old, a full-on toddler at the time, and every time I tell this story I have people point out to me that it’s impossible for a 15-month-old to remember anything long-term. Whenever I would talk about this with my mother she would tell me that she was convinced I was remembering a photograph or documentary I saw years later in school. I’m not, it’s a real memory.

Assassination

November 22, 1963 is a date that EVERYBODY over the age of 6 at the time remembers… you can ask anybody who was born before 1958 what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy was assassinated, and to a person they can all tell you where there were.

I don’t remember where I was, but apparently I was in my parents’ house in Imperial Beach, California (the last town north of the Mexican border in southern California). This article has been emotionally hard for me to write, because my mom passed away this summer. In the past, I would have just picked up the phone and called her and asked her “what we were doing” since I would have been with her at the time… losing a parent is hard to deal with, and it hits you at odd times like this.

Mammy helps us out

My oldest sister, Mammy, was old enough to remember, so I asked her. The following are her words:

“I had just had my 7th birthday and was in 2nd grade.

I remember being really really scared. We have to remember that this was not too long after the Cuban middle crisis. They had all of us kids “Duck, and cover!” – drills that had us cowering under our desk, preparing for nuclear middle attacks. We were scared to death on a regular basis…the President gets killed. Not a comforting time.

The first time I saw my mother cry was during the TV coverage of the assassination. Dad was immediately and inexplicably “busy at work” for a couple of days (he was in the Navy, sooo….).

I remember when Oswald was shot, Mom was satisfied that justice was done but Dad was furious – he said now we’d never know for sure what happened (prophetic words).

During the funeral on TV – Dad was on duty but the rest of us watched – you learned to REALLY march. We lived in a converted duplex so it had a really long living room, and as the procession wound it’s way through DC, you marched, back and forth and back and forth, the whole time. What had previously been wobbly toddler steps became strong and steady and sure. And when you saw John Jr salute the casket, you did too, albeit with the wrong hand, which Mom corrected.

Everyone was sad and scared.” 

I was too young… but…

I don’t remember anything but that one picture that seems imprinted in my brain. My next memory is looking at goldfish in a pond, with the sun sparkling on it in Florida the next year… I remember telling mom “Look at all the Goldwaters!” Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency in 1964 on the Republican ticket). You know, I still think goldfish in a sparkling pond should be called Goldwaters.

The world is different now, entirely different, than the world I was raised in. Most of the places I lived no longer exists.

My friends here of my age who grew up in the states were told to be careful around bulls and to not shoot their eyes out with BB guns. We were told to be very careful and never play with unexploded ordinance… and to stay out of the “Off Limits” areas that had yet to be cleared of arms and ordinance left over from WWII.

Where mainland country kids would find deer skulls in the woods, we would find unburied remains of Japanese soldiers that were exposed by earthquake-induced landslides (I personally did this twice) on islands like Okinawa.

I was a child of the cold war, and that war got one heck of a lot colder and more dangerous on November 22, 1963.

The world changed, but it didn’t end

Heaven forbid we ever have another assassination of a US president. I mean that with all my heart. 

America has had four serving presidents assassinated; Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963).

In the case of Lincoln, it was a supporter of the side that lost the civil war. Garfield was killed by a man angered that he didn’t get a government patronage position. McKinley’s assassin was a nutcase. Kennedy? Yeah, I’m not even going to go there, I have no idea who even killed him, let alone why.

One interesting but totally beside the point factoid: Presidential assassins (at least those accused of killing the president) have a very-short lifespan after the deed was done, at least historically. John Wilkes Booth (Lincoln) only lived 12 days, while Charles Guiteau (Garfield) lasted 5 months after Garfield’s demise. Leon Frank Czolgosz (McKinley) was fried in the electric chair seven weeks after he shot the President, while Lee Harvey Oswald (whether he was actually the assassin or no) was gunned down a day after Kennedy was shot.

So what does all this have to do with prepping?

I always like to stop and consider “what would happen if” and assassination is one of those potential catastrophic, societal changing events that could spark mass social unrest.

In my lifetime President’s Kennedy & Reagan were shot. Somebody pulled a 1911 and pulled the trigger aimed at President Ford (fortunately, she hadn’t chambered a round… she just thought if you pulled the trigger it would go bang) then just 17 days later another woman pointed a revolver at President Ford (a bystander knocked the attempted assassin’s arm up and she missed). There were four separate attempts to assassinate Bill Clinton while he was in office. Overseas, somebody threw a hand grenade (that fortunately was a dud) at George H.W. Bush. There were also four attempts made against President Obama and so far there has been one serious attempt at President Trump.

It happens. 

Domestic unrest and violence

Let me be clear, assassination is a terrible thing, and normally it’s the kind of thing that I mentally shove aside and try not to think about.

But as somebody who’s a prepper, I have to stop and consider that in today’s instant information world, things can get out of hand very quickly based upon the speed of flow of information. 

Here’s one thing we have learned all too well following recent events… information flows fast, but ACCURATE information comes out much slower.

With today’s media, so much of what is first known turns out to be completely wrong and inaccurate, yet people will still react to it.

Social violence can explode with little-to-no warning, and as I’ve hopefully demonstrated here, you never know when a trigger like an assassination attempt can occur. 

That’s why it’s so important to have your get-home bag, your routes planed, your communications plan in place, etc. All this stuff we preach may be the difference between getting home or getting caught up in a bad situation.

Just please think about it.