Nov 22, 1963. Dallas. A rifle. A shot. And the path of history changed in an instant. If you are of a certain age, can you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing? I sure do.
I was in college, had taken a semester off and was working in the shipping department of U.S. Electrical Motors in L.A.. One of the line workers came into the office and said, "The president's been shot." In the shocked silence, a woman named Rugh, who worked on the motor serial desk, a rabid, racist Republican who would have fit in perfectly at a particularly looney Tea Party rally, leaned back in her chair, clapped her hands, laughed and said, "Well, they finally got that son of a bitch!"
The silence in the room went on forever.
It wasn't until years later that I began to comprehend exactly what she represented. And while she has been long dead, her ghost never died. It's alive and well and is operating overtime today. Some ugly things in America just never die.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
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2 comments:
Ugh, what a horrible reaction! So disrespectful to the office, even if you hated the president.
I was in a high school class and the reaction was a stunned silence and a feeling of panic. No one knew what to do.
Walking home from High School worrying about too much homework. Everyone was stopped in the street and the sad news was shared. We all grieved in a small town in England
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