JFK's words... Finding Home.

  Where is home? Does anyone else feel that way in the USA? Am I the only one who feels

 sickened by what America has become? Probably not.

  Though don't start the 'blow up the white house' with me. I will get to Trump in this letter but maybe at the end. 

   I was born in 1951 some 67 years ago. I still have most of my cognitive facilities intact. Enough to have a perspective that a person born in the 1970's can't share. This is true of course of generation after generation. This by no means suggests or guarantees that people of my generation will agree with me but whether we agree with our opinions of the flow of history we indeed at least did share it.

   By the time I was starting to grasp the world of adults this is what I was seeing… a beautiful country (ours) rich with opportunities, from my Dads meager salary as a Unitarian Minister we found a way to live in houses that gave room for a family of 5 kids and parents. A home with a yard. That was going to be yours if you applied yourself. I grasped the world of conflict ….. Communism the threat vs Democracy a cloud of fear hung over us as we experienced The missile crisis of 1962, children had nightmares, adults had nightmares… The anti -Nuclear movement beginning.. The magic of JFK, never had a President seemed to embody such a completely positive direction for America… meanwhile the police dogs chasing Negroes in the South, riots in the North in my hometown.. the realization of how far we needed to go for justice at home… the assassinations and the steady growth of the Vietnam War..

     I think of JFK frequently and think of what we need to be reminded of.

     'Genuine  peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For Peace is a process, a way of solving problems ….

      'Let us examine our attitude towards Peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that War is inevitable --that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

       'We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade---therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable --and we believe they can do it again….  (reason and spirit)

      So let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

    From a commencement address @ Georgetown University June 1963

     In the 1960's I realized that America's population had grown from my sixth grade days when our 'weekly reader' informed us that we were a nation of 160 MIllion and by the time the decade ended we were approaching 180 million population. Back in the weekly reader days we read of China and their 400 Million people and,  Ooooohhh! That's a lot of people some of us thought…. woooh aren't we lucky to be such a smart people to only have the 160 million… Times change. By the 1970's and I am experiencing a bit of college and I read and we all read… and a world doubling it's population… and maybe doubling it again. Oh my but someone will speak out ...  leadership will arrive...