22-11-2008, 10:46 PM
New York World-Telegram & Sun, 26 November 1963, p.23
Where Violence Rings
By Richard Starnes
Where Violence Rings
By Richard Starnes
Quote:The United States, with its unswerving dedication to violence and its cherished tradition of over-reacting, can look forward to the next months only with misgivings.
No man alive can guess how deeply the fabric of the nation has been wounded by the Byzantine horror of assassination compounded by assassination, of murder heaped upon murder. But it is foolhardy to assume that all will soon be as it was before. Indecency took the country by the throat in a raw, too-rich too-soon Texas city, and none can say what the ending will be.
Our credentials as a civilized people stand suspect before the world, of course, but the real depth of the disaster that has befallen us cannot yet be measured. In the 188th year, the republic has fallen upon unspeakably evil days, and great mischief is abroad the land. It remains to be seen whether more convulsions will rack us before it is over.
History warns us not to be optimistic on this score. We are not a mature people. When deeply hurt, we lash out; when troubled and afraid we too often seek comfort in wild excesses that remain to haunt us through history. Assailed by privation and hardship in a savage land, we slew innocent women as witches. Insane with rage at the murder of Lincoln, we fastened the vengeful Reconstruction on the South, and in doing so insured that the terrible wounds of the Civil War would fester and sicken us for a century and more.
Our initial response to the infant threat of Bolshevism was the disgrace of the Palmer raids, which made a mockery of civil rights and human decency in the winter of 1919-20. And what adult among us cannot remember the sorry episode that we customarily reduce to the convenient historical shorthand of McCarthyism? Joe McCarthy was in the van, and deserves to be memorialized in the name we give that time of trial, but behind him was an army of lip-movers, the get of witch burners and rack manipulators since the dawn of time. Americans were never able to understand the horror with which civilized nations viewed that dismal epoch; Americans knew (or thought they knew) that the hysteria was typical of us. Other people wondered and worried that it might well be typical.
We are still the children of the generations that wrested the land from savages in bloody combat. We waste our finest young men on foreign beaches and in alien jungles, we kill our families by the tens of thousands on our highways, we sell soap and celebrate violence simultaneously on the great medium for mass hypnosis that television has become, we educate our children in brutal games of cops and robbers and we don’t tell them until too late that it is not always the bad guys that get killed.
John Kennedy is a symbol of this profligate waste of our most valuable national treasure. He was not, as some would now have us believe, a household god. He was a man with all the vanity and frailty of all men, but he was uniquely a man whom the nation and the world could ill afford to waste so wantonly.
No more could we afford the grisly, bizarre sequel in Dallas. What manner of people have we become, that the wretched assassin could not be spared even long enough to get the due process that John Kennedy and so many other American men have died for?
Have the base instincts of revenge and hate imprisoned us beyond any hope of rescue? Have we embarked upon the dark sea of violence and despair that has engulfed so many civilizations that have gone before?
If we have, then heaven help our poor children. And if there remains time to turn back and retrace our way to humanity, compassion and decency, let us make the turning now. John Kennedy was cruelly taken in the summer of his life; if the foul act is to be given meaning, then it must become a signal for the moral regeneration of all the people of America.