Yesterday I contributed the ‘Thought for the Day’ on BBC Radio Ulster, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Or read the text of the contribution:
JFK & The Future
Fifty-seven years ago today, President John F Kennedy was shot as he rode in an open-top car through Dallas, Texas.
I grew up in the United States. The grainy television footage of the Kennedy assassination has been part of my consciousness for as long as I can remember. One moment, the charismatic young President and First Lady are smiling and waving. The next, the President is slumped in his seat, while his wife desperately scrambles to save him.
In an interview with Life magazine shortly after her husband’s death, Jackie Kennedy said: ‘There will be great presidents again. But there will never be another Camelot’. Camelot evoked the court of Arthur, the legendary king of ancient Britain who presided over a golden age.
In Ireland as well as in the United States, it has been taken for granted that Kennedy was a ‘great president’. A generation or two in the past, countless Irish Catholic homes boasted framed images of Kennedy alongside their framed images of the Pope.
And the romance of Kennedy’s Camelot was very much alive in my American childhood home. My mother was neither Irish-American nor belonged to Kennedy’s political party. But she spoke about the Kennedys with a certain reverence. On the rare occasions when she received a Kennedy half dollar coin in her change at the shops, she set it aside, only to be spent if absolutely necessary.
Novelist Stephen King’s 2011 fantasy thriller 11.22.63 taps into this sense of longing for a golden age. The hero, Jake, gains access to a time travelling portal and embarks on a quest to go back in time and prevent the Kennedy assassination.
Jake’s task proves more daunting than King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail. But when he finally saves Kennedy’s life and returns to the twenty-first century, Jake discovers that there has been no golden age. Kennedy’s survival has triggered a series of events that have made the world a darker and more dangerous place.
Jake chose to live in the past, literally, with dire consequences for the future. And while we cannot travel back in time, some of us will live today and each one after it in the past, haunted by grief and regret.
It is right and good to remember Kennedy and others whose lives have been cut short. But let’s not allow ourselves to be consumed by what might-have-been. Living in the present is the best way to change the future.