Remembering JFK

It was fifty years ago this week that John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president.   Millions of people today weren’t alive back then, but believe me, he opened up an exciting new world.

Kennedy was young, rich, smart, witty, and a war hero to boot, and he brought with him a lovely first lady, nothing like the dowdy ones from years past.  Like the handsome prince riding in on a white shining stallion and rescues the princess, this was our hero who would save our delicately beautiful but troubled country.  Out with old man Eisenhower.

Americans had finally elected the first president born in the twentieth century. We felt renewed and energetic. 

Kennedy gave us hope, and America couldn’t remember anything like it.


I was just a kid back then, but I remember watching TV and seeing Jack and Jackie marching up Pennsylvania Avenue in that freezing degree weather for the swearing-in ceremony.
His most famous line of course:

“And so my friends, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

It was quoted so frequently, it’s now become a cliché, yet most of us don’t really remember the words, or maybe we no longer care.

People only want what their country can give to them.  So they eat themselves sick until they get diabetes or refuse to save a dime for retirement, expecting social security, which was never supposed to be a means of full support, to cover them completely.

                                                                                                  
Hey, but this is a good week for warm fuzzy feelings because Kennedy was a positive man, an achiever who strove to keep the cup half filled.

If he were alive today and and saw the tape of that woman walking in the mall while texting fall into the fountain, he’d laugh his head off like the rest of us.  It's just the part about suing that changes things.  

Guess she’d rather cause harm to others than accept the blame for something that was entirely her fault.   She wasn't exactly what Kennedy had in mind when he suggested growing a backbone to stand up for one’s country.

Still he was human and like everyone else, enjoyed nothing better than a bolsterous belly laugh.