LOST INNOCENCE

Recently I've been watching videos online of songs from my college years, which were 1959-63. Then, everything was pitched to teenagers, and "puppy love" was the thing. Cute guys like Bobby Vee and Jimmy Clanton appealed to girls, but they also gave us some really good songs. Neil Sedaka, not cute but gifted, wrote and sang a string of peppy, lyrical hits. There was happiness in the air and we believed in our future.

Don McLean in "American Pie" traced our national angst to the death of Buddy Holly (February, '59). But the darkening of our culture didn't begin till after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (November, '63). It has in fact become a belief of Americans that the end of "Camelot" began a national loss of innocence.

Vietnam came along. Lyndon Johnson lied to us.The sweetness of the Counterculture collapsed into the Drug Culture. Many blue collar Democrats, offended by McGovernism, defected. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were struck down. We became divided politically in a more drastic and unbridgeable way than we had been, and cynical rightists gained the ascendancy and have held it.

There has been much wondering and speculating about what would have happened had JFK lived. Could this handsome and cool-headed young war hero who balanced realism and idealism and championed excellence, surrounding himself with brilliant people, have steered us clear of pitfalls and kept the country together? Would the popular culture have remained wholesome and optimistic? Could our growing nihilism and fanaticism have been averted?

It is hard to conceive that one person, however outstanding, could have achieved all that. And Kennedy had lost popularity by the time of his death; I recall that on the day he died a headline reported that the young were no longer enchanted with him. It seems more as though his murder was one symptom of a national trend that would have come in any event.

Today we have a president who is more like JFK at his best than any president has been. Here
is a figure of rationality, integrity, and hope: the kind of leader we should want.

How do we respond to Barack Obama? He is attacked from the left, the center, and the right; second-guessed by the media; doubted by the public; defied by the politicians; defamed by the talk radio haters. Everything about him is dissected and dismissed as not enough or too much. When people can't find something to criticize, they make up nonsense about him being born abroad or wanting to impose socialism on us. It appears sometimes that the entire country is bent on hobbling him and keeping him from doing anything for it.

So our dark age has reached its nadir at the same moment that we have elected a person of light and uprightness to lead us.

Now we must discover - and decide - whether we will choose settled darkness or illumination.