Ozzie and Blake*

This is certainly a time of cascading crises....a  pandemic,  the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter,  tensions with China and Russia and elsewhere  all conspire to make these truly unprecedented times. And the fine , or perhaps just tiny,  hand of our criminally corrupt and inept president can be seen running through all of this.

Publishing the picture of our wedding in 1963 , and some of the comments here on Blipfoto, led me to think, looking back, that these were the last carefree moments in our own lives and in the life of our nation. For bad as current times times are,  I cannot help feeling that, beginning with the assassination of Kennedy just five months after our wedding, this nation went through some very dark times. It is a sad comment that some of the themes of those times are still being debated and/or repeated. 

The assassinations of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby brought an abrupt end to Camelot. The Vietnam war was escalating and young men were being drafted for an unpopular war. Those who had the funds and the connections were deferred. The rest, including, many, many of color lost their lives in an unwinnable war. We marched, we demonstrated and we finally made our voices heard. The war ended, but nobody won.

There was terrible racial unrest in the country and Martin Luther King became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, leading non violent protests, and students from all over the country joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee  to confront racial injustice. 

Then Martin Luther King was assassinated and his non-violent message was lost. Four white students from other parts of the country joined SNCC to fight racial injustice and were murdered, their bodies found in a ditch.

We are still fighting for justice for Black people in America, and we are still fighting unwinnable wars. After he graduated from college, one of our sons went to Vietnam on a business trip where he was told he would be taken on a tour of the tunnels made by the Viet Congress. He seemed puzzled by the whole thing and unable to relate to it. It struck me that he was not yet born when we were marching in the streets and had none of our indelible memories.

Perhaps that is why history is doomed to keep repeating itself.

*Blake is staying with us while Dana and Jim get a new roof. The two of them, the old dog and the younger one watching me drink my cappuccino and waiting to lick the cup when I finished was the only picture I took today. Blake is turning into a replica of Ozzie, including a grey beard....