Like Kennedy

Beside the time I saw a car just like the one in which I took Driver's Ed in high school (a 1968 Chevrolet Biscayne the approximate size of that Korean ship that foundered in the Atlantic over the weekend) in the Antique Division at the Fourth of July parade (held in the same streets in Towson in which I raced about in that Chevy as the instructor, Mr Adkins, and a female in my class hung on for dear life), the second time I felt really old was when I asked a grocery cashier what sort of thing she was studying in high school.

The response was swift, and right to my heart: "Oh, old presidents. Like Kennedy."

Our parents had December 7, 1941, as a touchstone. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led the US into a war that had been raging in Europe, turning it into the Second World War.  Mind you, they called the First World War (1914 - 1918) the War To End All Wars, because it was thought there would be no more.  So much for hopeful intentions.

World War II (1941 - 1945) became something for all Americans to work together to win, and with one exception I don't think that sort of esprit de corps nationwide has existed since. After that war, we hardly had time to pull up our socks before the Korean War (1950 - 1953) and the Viet Nam war (1955 - 1975) dragged us overseas to fight to maintain the status quo won in WW2.

The nation had little heart for the Korean Conflict, and the homefront battling over Viet Nam tore that heart out day by day as the death toll and the sense of futility grew.

I bring all this history up because I realize that the students who just began college this fall were born in 2001, and so the events of September 11 of that year are not in their range of memory at all, other than movies and documentaries and history class lessons.

Please, don't forget all you have learned from those sources, but also, remember this: for several months after September 11, 2001, there was a feeling of a pax Americana - an American peace - here on the homefront as the battles raged over it elsewhere.

I clearly remember people being more polite, more considerate. People let each other go ahead in traffic. People who had family members on active duty had others asking about their kin and praying for them to come home safe. People paid it forward, people smiled at each other, and people passed the time of day with total strangers.

This pacific feeling didn't last nearly long enough, but I'll remember it, and I wrote this to pass along that memory to the young who weren't here yet and to those of us who were and might have forgotten.

It wasn't quite Camelot (January 1961 - November 22, 1963) but it was close.