Fifty years ago

The exact circumstances of my being in Grand Rapids, Michigan, right then I don't remember. What I know is that I didn't have a job; and because I didn't, I watched TV the morning after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. He'd just won the California primary, just made a victory speech when an assassin named Sirhan Sirhan put some bullets in him at close range. He was pronounced dead about 24 hours later. 

Like anyone else alive in November of 1963, I remember almost every painful moment of his brother's death in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy. I was just a kid back then. I remember exactly where I was sitting in what class when the announcement came over the squawk box hung up beside the flag at the classroom door. It was the principal. I don't remember the words exactly, but what he told us was that our President was dead.

It was terrible, but I don't think--I don't remember really--that I would have considered myself among JFK's great admirers. An uncle of mine spoke publicly about keeping Senator Kennedy from the Presidency because--my uncle minced no words--JFK was a Roman Catholic. His election, my uncle insisted, would mean America would be run by the Pope. I remember listening to all of that in an after-church program on Sunday night. I don't remember what I thought, but I do remember being sort of proud of the way my uncle held forth.

Five years later, I was in college, older and less conservative. I only faintly remember the primaries that year, but I knew that a fresh face named McCarthy, a poet from Minnesota, had come out of nowhere to challenge the likely candidates. I knew LBJ had thrown in the towel, leaving the field open for his VP, another Minnesotan named Hubert Humphrey.

But this Senator McCarthy had taken on HH and scored some significant upsets, including a handy one in New Hampshire. That's when RFK announced that he too would get into the race.

I remember thinking him something of an opportunist, a slippery figure who'd come barging into the race once McCarthy had made it clear traditional Democrats like HH were vulnerable. He was an opportunist with huge name clout, I thought, even though, back then, I'm sure I would have appreciated his anti-war stance. There was a bit of a dynasty stink to him.

But that morning, fifty years ago, RFK was dead, and I watched for hours, trying to restrain the sinking feeling that beset most all of us that year, most of the time. JFK had been murdered five years before, MLK only a couple months back. And then this--a man who'd just scored big time in California, leaving a hotel podium through the kitchen, where yet another assassin, this one named Sirhan Sirhan, gunned him down.

It's difficult to imagine the cultural partisanship we're in right now could be any worse. Thirty-some percent of the American people would likely find a reason to stick with Trump even if he did shoot Comey did on Fifth Avenue in New York. But a pretty high percentage of people would, if given the chance, shoot Trump. It's a terrifying divide with a spectrum of associated hot buttons--immigration, climate change, gun control, Black Lives Matter. There's a sharp line in the sand that's really but a disguise covering a black hole that threatens all of us.

Is that divide scarier than the one that separated us 50 years ago? 

I don't know.

What I do know is that, for whatever reasons, I really wasn't, back then, much of a supporter of the Presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy. But as I watched television that morning, in a house not all that far from a neighborhood where race riots had already taken place, I wondered about the country in which I was born and reared, in which I lived, in which I hoped to live my adult life. 

What I remember is that, to me at least, it was all very scary.