November 22

November 22

It was between Christmas and New Years 1959; my dad brought home a few Pamphlets about Kennedy, John Fitzgerald that is. I was twelve and would be thirteen in March. I was an alienated troubled child who was doing poorly in school. Coming from a mixed marriage with parents from two totally different worlds and did not get along. My father was Italian, Catholic and Democratic. The family of my mother was LDS Swedish John Birch Society.  My peers and their parents for being excessively precocious and ethnic looking targeted me. There he was Kennedy, hero worship from the get go. I followed the campaign religiously. The election was manna from heaven, my room; my private space became a temple to Kennedy. I became a Kennedy expert, I read and reread his book Profiles in Courage. I told a retold his WWII experience to anyone who would listen. Huntley-Brinkley Report was my favorite TV show.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was the docudrama that filled every waking second as long as it lasted. Will; you get the picture.  November 22 1963 the day that changed my life forever. I lost a personal family member. My identity was shattered. I was a sixteen year old without a name or belief in myself, or knowledge of who I was. In my tragic emptiness I discovered the existential absurd of Sartre and Camus but that really didn’t help. By the time I was eighteen, 1965, I had totally remade myself. I had become a reborn evangelical Anarchist Communist.  By the time I was twenty I became an IWW Anarchist Syndicalist. By Twenty-five a classical/ orthodox/ humanist Marxist and each stage I added too and not really gave up the earlier positions.