Grief

Historian Arnold Toynbee, who escaped service in World War I only because he had contracted typhoid fever in Greece before the war began, saw that war kill most of his college contemporaries. Much later, toward the far end of his long life, he wrote that his grief and indignation at the sacrifice of so many million lives had not lessened, but had grown greater, as the years went by. What had been lost grew ever clearer. What had been attained grew ever less. The evil consequences that had followed the useless sacrifice had become ever more plain.

That’s how I feel about the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In the years since his death, his reputation was tarnished by revelations about his sex life, and about his indirect contact with underworld figures, and by revelation about the government’s attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. In addition, what looks like an organized disinformation campaign has spread all manner of rumors about him and his brothers. Even the controversies surrounding various attempts to come to the truth about his assassination have diverted attention from what it was that he actually did, and thought, and said, and wanted to do.

John F. Kennedy gave off the impression of youthful vigor, but the carefully guarded truth was that in all his 46 years, he was never able to count upon normal health in the way that most people can. He was always ill, often critically so. (He received the last rites of his church four times before he was murdered.) It seems likely that he would have died relatively young even had he been allowed a natural death. So it is not because his life was cut short that I still mourn his assassination. As his brother said to his children, “Jack had a wonderful life.”

No, it isn’t so much for him as for the world he was helping to steer toward sanity.

Fifty years have shown how far ahead of public opinion he was, how much more he understood about his times than almost anyone else in a position of power, how much more rational and sane his policies and perspectives were than those which were implemented when he was gone.

After 50 years, I am more than ever overwhelmed by grief at what we lost.

 

4 thoughts on “Grief

  1. Frank? Not of to be among “the know it all” folks, but as far as to have learned by the reading of the methaphysical, spiritual/psychics throughout the years as such….Grief is to be of the Earth….or?

    Another thought of the same right now(as of to have studied a lot of the same after all of these years)….of it is nothing but The Self “out there”….And when of to follow it up in the same genre(in the same concept),as it is no Death, so why grieving?
    JFK is still alive somewhere(but not in the same body, or is he?)

    Heartily, Inger Lise.
    P.S. I have been in Dallas and into the same building in 2002, and to have watched out of the same window as it is told Harvey Lee Oswald once did when the shooting occured(the building a museum back in 2002).

    1. Inger, when i was a boy, the grief was for the man — lovely man that he was. Now that i am an old man myself, the grief is for all the possibilities that were closed off by that crime. Look at America today and compare it to what it was in 1963, for all its deep flaws then, and you see the result of a long half-century spent going in the wrong direction, under the covert leadership of the wrong people.

      For what it’s worth, Jim Garrison’s book convinced me that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA operative, who was also somehow an operative of the FBI (one would have thought the two mutually exclusive), who was set up as a patsy, was mouse-trapped into being arrested, and was murdered before he could tell his story in open court. The records of his long interrogation at police headquarters were destroyed. Fancy that.

  2. John and Bobby were my heroes and still are. They were far too dangerous to too many powerful people to be aloud to live. Ditto King. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy — this tendency had to be stopped, and was. We must week for those and so many others who have killed in our wars on every side by this incredibly sick and deadly U.S. cartel.

  3. Go to http://www.theconstantine report.com for new information on how and why so many musicians such John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and others did not die in the manner in which we’re told, but were murdered because they spoke for justice and human rights.
    An interesting book is War Is a Racket by Smedley d. Butler.
    John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr were all heroes.
    There is also plenty of evidence and witnesses testifying to the fact that John F Kennedy, Jr, his wife Carolyn and her sister were also killed. The story we’ve been told about that, of course, is what so many believe.

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