Today is the 60th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, an event that had a profound effect on all of us old enough to remember the tragedy. I was in the eighth grade at the time and my experience is expressed in a poem from 2013: Innocence Lost.
For many of us, it was our first experience with gun violence and, having come soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it shook our faith in the security of our Government. The turbulent years of the Sixties would follow, characterized by anti-war protests, civil rights demonstrations, a chaotic political convention and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Sixty years on, we face a more existential threat, a Political Party that cannot divorce itself from a Presidential candidate who threatens the very fabric of our Democracy. Gun violence itself has become a national scourge. Back in 1963, we were uncertain who to blame for the crisis but, today, the bloated culprit is impossible to ignore.
