It was almost exactly 53 years ago that we were presented with the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  While I had been a Nixon supporter, I was pleased with Kennedy’s charisma and leadership and the news was devastating…our President…MY President had been assassinated!  I remember walking around for days feeling as if I were going to throw-up.  Now, 53 years later I am experiencing that same feeling—the loss of hope and of imminent despair, yet it is not the same.  The difference between then and now was there were able persons in Kennedy’s administration to take the reins and continue to lead us. The personal loss of our President still burned deeply but the country continued on in the same steady course as always.  Today we have placed it in the hands of incompetents.

Another difference was that the assassination was the action of a single bitter angry young man with a desperate desire to act in a political way to further the cause of his commitment to communism and in so doing elevate himself as an important “revolutionary.”   Today the assassins are neighbors, a barber, a retired school teacher, a used-car salesman, etc.. who believe they should have been dealt a better hand and have been short-changed by a changing world.  They believe they should have more and others less, especially those not of their ethnicity or religion.  They have retreated to the mind-set of blaming their failures on the actions of others; on taxation, immigration, automation and globalization.  They want the country to retreat to the 1930’s but personally retain all their technological comforts of 2016, their motor homes, big-screen tvs and Medicare benefits.

If these people truly wanted change why — with an 11% approval rating — did congress achieve almost complete re-election, sending them back to continue to do little or no actual work during their difficult work schedule of less than 3 days/week.  The answer is simple and sad.  They don’t really want change, better conditions nationally and world-wide, just changes specific to each of them so as to enhance their comfort for the short terms of their lives.  And in desperation they have put their trust in the hands of a man who promises them he can and will fix things without any explanation of how.

The human race has its share of failings but this is by far the most self-serving.  Sad!