Saturdays with Seniors: Hank Learns the Significance of Voting

I am pleased to introduce Hank Bliss as our featured Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. I’d intended to wait until November to publish the essay he wrote for my “When I Ceased to be a Child” prompt, but after the Democratic National Convention this past week I decided now is the time.

by Hank Bliss

NOVEMBER 22, 1963. Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing that day (at least I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t).

I was in my second year of graduate school at MIT and was leaving a classroom around noon at the end of a lecture. In the hallway someone exclaimed that the president had just been shot. It took a few moments before I realized that she was talking about the President of the United States. The rest of that day and the ensuing Thanksgiving weekend are a blurry mix of walking around in a daze, talking to people I knew and didn’t know, and simply trying to make sense of what had happened.

Most people appeared to be genuinely in shock but some seemed not to care, and a few even seemed happy. The latter was a surprise which remains with me to this day.

Before that rifle shot I was (I think) a typical kid. Where I lived, the concept of domestic vs international didn’t exist. World War II was over by the time I was 6. Korea was a matter of checking the front page of the Chicago Tribune to see the shrinking Pusan Perimeter before turning to the sports section for the real results of interest. I did bicycle around Europe with three friends between high school and college but to me it still seemed like visiting someplace close to Chicago, except for one thing: it took longer to get there.

I came of voting age in college and my parents sent me literature claiming a vote for Kennedy was a vote for the Pope. I voted for Nixon, giving little thought about the significance of voting.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, most Americans, including me, had never heard of Vietnam and had no idea where it was. That weekend marked my emergence as an adult. It was not an “aha” moment. I did not purchase a T-shirt advertising it. In fact, it wasn’t until this weeks prompt that I thought about it in these terms. But I began to be interested in what was going on in the world.

Vietnam became a household word and I eventually became anti-war. I had a commitment to serve in the military — and maybe go to “Nam” — and I determined that one must honor a commitment. As much as we may disapprove of the conduct and actions of our elected President, we mustn’t applaud his (or her) removal by other than constitutionally allowed means.

After all this, I better understood my discomfort with members of my own family who cheered at the death of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962. And so the story and progression grew. I am an adult and a better person today, in part, because of that terrible Thanksgiving weekend in 1963.