We can't duck

On November 23, 1963, the day on which John Kennedy, our 35th President, was assassinated, we had just buried my grandmother in Oak Grove cemetery.  As we were getting out of our cars for her wake at Aunt Kathy’s house on Wilkinson Street, the neighbor shouted from her front door, “They shot the president!”  I don’t know that she said “killed” the president--we learned that when we turned on  the TV immediately. In a way, the death of the President overtook our ability to mourn the loss of my grandma, Maude Bernath.

At the time, I was living in married housing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and had flown up to Chelsea for the funeral.  When I returned,  I stayed in our studio apartment for the week of national mourning, shades pulled, weeping periodically while watching transfixed as Jackie set the bar for how to behave when your husband has been assassinated.

After a three year hiatus in Canada, we returned to Oxford with our newborn son, Andrew, and took our initial steps on University Avenue as young parents.   In April 1968, just months into our new stage of life, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  The country was stunned again. But, this tragedy was followed two months later by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, brother of our slain president and presidential hopeful. Paralyzed, I did not recognize the country in which I lived.  This was something that happened only in unstable places in the world.  Sadly, other shootings became background noise without rising to the level of national alarm, and I became inattentive.

Until the shootings at Columbine High School twenty-five years later. I served on the Planning Commission in Mason where I lived and sat on the dais in front of an audience in the 1990s.  I never felt uncomfortable there. The shootings spawned my return to the feeling of living in an unhinged land. 

One evening, a resident objected to something that was going to happen near his property, and he felt that the Commission should intervene and provide relief.  Phil, our chair, led a tight meeting but was unable to get the exercised man to take his seat.  Tension rose, my heart started racing, and for the first time in my life, I wondered if I would have to duck to save myself from a bullet.

Now we live in a society with manufactured fear of the other, and gun violence is identified as a national health issue.  We simply can’t duck from that.