The assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

It was just a few months after my 8th birthday. I was in the second grade and we lived at 1111 So Fifth Street, Conroe, TX.

It was a Friday. I was on the school bus going home. My bus stop was at the corner of Silverdale and Fifth Street. As I was getting off the bus the driver told me.

It is one of those events that you never forget where you were when you heard. I remember stepping down the three short steps of the bus, the walk down the block to our house, my mother’s tears, the shock and the sadness.

President Kennedy was buried the following Monday. There was no school that day and I watched the funeral on a black and white TV with the rest of my family.

Hard to believe sixty years have passed. It was in the beginning of the sixties, it was the beginning of a decade of changes; civil rights movement, feminism, the sexual revolution, war protests, countercultural revolutions, and assassinations. .

Just five years later in the summer before my 13th birthday on April 4, 1968 and June 6, 1968, first Martin Luther King, Jr and then Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. As I watched the news, I sadly realized that real evil exists in the world and hate destroys.

Now I have reached the age where I wonder if anything has really changed for the better in my lifetime.

As I remember those brave and inspiring men who stood for change I wonder if they died in vain because we as a nation are still divided, we still see our fellow citizens as enemies, we still hate and real evil still exists.