We remember poorly what happened over 50 years ago. The bad is covered with a veneer of good memories for many people. I try to peel that veneer back from time to time, so I can compare times more accurately.

We all owe a great deal of gratitude, man, for the hippies, man.

Now those once young rebels fill office chairs all over the land. They grow organics, install solar panels, vote for Liberals, and still protest war.

What the country needs is more hippies, man.

I was a beatnik in 1964 and a hippie in 1968. Now, I'm an old hippie, and get called that frequently, most recently at the barber shop where I had a haircut and beard trim at my usual four month interval.

It's in the head.

It's a way of life. A way of looking at the world and seeing more than just the end of your nose, or the money in your wallet.

It's looking for Love and Peace in everything. It digs down, and sees life as it really can be. Can Be.

We have made much progress. Thank a hippie today!!

university then and hung out with a very progressive crowd. I was tear gassed several times and all of that, fled when the helicopters came into campus and buses of the national guard. Looking back in many ways I was sheltered, because I was so involved with university activities, but my leftest spirit has never gone away. The music was great, I though the better parts of those years would last forever, some things have. It was a turning point for this country, we need another. Much of my thoughts today are shaped by those years.

lives deeply affected by those days. I took a different path from many of my schoolmates, based on some of the things I listed in my OP. Where many of my peers moved smoothly into the lives that were not far removed from their parents' lifestyles, I dropped out of college early in 1965, and gravitated to a different reality over the next several years.

It's interesting now to see some of those I graduated from high school with in 1963 and myself. I went to our 50th reunion in 2013, and was bemused by the disparity between the life experiences I've had and those of most of my peers. I credit people like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and others for my early awakening, and MLK, Jr. for opening my eyes completely. It's been a helluva ride.

Since then, it's ALL been downhill.....


( absolutely necessary....)

Not even sarcasm is appropriate.

But I think you know that?

Malcolm X had a particular viewpoint on that time period. Not having his life experience nor his take on things, I wouldn't have agreed with him at the time. Things were about to take a turn in racial matters shortly. The stage was set for that before JFK was assassinated, and the events would have happened, even if that assassination hadn't happened.

I didn't get involved in civil rights issues until 1965, really. I was a California kid from a small town. It took me some time to learn what was happening in many aspects of US society. As I learned about racism, I became more interested. After dropping out of college in early 1965, I drove across the country on one of those late adolescent rambles. I ended up in Selma just in time to have missed the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge. I did make it to Montgomery, though, in time to hear the "How long?" speech from the back of the crowd.

That speech was one of the things that woke me up at age 19 to changes that needed to be made. Since then, I've been both a participant and an observer of things that have led to change.

Means there will be easily gathered eggs in the morn.

The oppression suffered by people with the color of skin that Malcolm X had, was directly from the hand of the powers that at the time were represented by JFK as the POTUS. It was just one big hand with many fingers. Each finger that could be decapitated was a victory for the oppressed.

it to mean that the U.S. was busy exporting violence both against African Americans and other peoples of color here and also against the developing world and its peoples. Some of that violence came back to the U.S. on November 22, 1963 in Dealey Plaza.

Malcolm's words, true though they might have been, extended into the gratutiously cruel, imo, when he said he was 'glad' those chickens had come home to roost. I'm not a big fan of gratuitous cruelty and I really don't give a shit who utters it.

If you had you might understand why the term meant glad changes were happening. That things occur: because. And when change does come for oppressed, it is usually good for those oppressed.

Malcolm X was. So I'll concede your point.

For that matter, as one of my Socialist comrades pointed out to me last night, as sad as it was for John-John and Carolyn, it was just as sad for children of parents who were Viet Cong and tortured or killed by Diem's goons and just as sad for children of parents in Iraq's Communist Party who were tortured and killed when Qassam was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in February '63 (by the Ba'ath Party, fore-runner of Saddam).

So, again, I'll concede the point. Just too damned much sadness all the way around, seems to me.

We weren't paying for a space program so others could go.

We were ALL supposed to be flying through space by now. Just like the airplane led the way to passenger flights. It wasn't going to just be for the RICH either.

Then, we stopped doing that. It was never one of my dreams, although exploration beyond our planet does continue. I would not have believed it possible to land a probe on a comet, and yet that has now been done.

The fantasy of humanity leaving Earth to set up elsewhere has always seemed to be to be far-fetched and unlikely in the extreme. It still does. Instead, I'd rather save this planet, if possible.

....if Nixon hadn't considered NASA to be a "Kennedy thing".

He was a short sighted bastard.

It's a very long way from a temporary moon landing to a base on the moon. It's also a very long way from a manned landing on the moon to a similar landing on Mars. I don't see how the funding would have been there for either, regardless of who was President in the interim. The blowback from the amount of money required would have been tremendous.

I'm uncertain whether we will every resume manned exploration of space. In fact, I doubt that we will. The obstacles are way to large to overcome, given the precarious state of our own planet.

The military budget could have been cut too.

The point is, the money was THERE.

What was needed was more "heavy lift" capabilities to put up a space station and then go from there to modules on the moon for a base. Eventually materials would be mined on the moon. It was all planned out. Nixon ended it.

the next step is a larger one than would have been supported in a political sense. There were already people who were pissed off about the cost of space exploration. The "heavy lift" capabilities you so lightly toss into the conversation were not available, and developing them was something that would have been a real challenge.

As for mining materials on the moon, that's questionable. While there may be mineral reserves on the moon, few of them would be different from those available on this planet, frankly, and the cost of mining and transporting them would be prohibitive. The Earth has resources for every known natural element to be mined. There aren't any unknown ones on the moon and no proven deposits of anything that would warrant the cost of mining.

I'm not seeing the practical uses of a moon colony, to tell you the truth, and the difficulties of establishing even a scientific research station on the moon would be so high that I don't see any potential for even that.

Mars is more interesting, but its distance makes it a tough haul for manned exploration, due to time constraints. It seems even less likely to be a project that will ever be done.

I grew up dreaming of the potential of space exploration, too. I no longer see it as a practical possibility, though. Scientific, unmanned exploration? Absolutely, and the recent comet landing is evidence that we can do that and that we will continue to. But I've seen nothing that would support manned exploration, either scientifically or economically. There's just no there there.

face it, had the 'revolution' kept going after Stalin's death in 1954- we may have postponed the destruction of plan earth, but the revolution was already doomed- and Uncle Joe sorta knew it; even armed with nukes. How was it possible, Stalin asked himself, for an ally of the west which lost 20 million of its people and 1/3rd of its industry base, to suddenly find itself in a 'cold war' with the largely undamaged USA etc? The fascists had RUN Eastern Europe until the horrors of WW1 30 years before had totally broke the bank- and the vast majority of the educated were rightwingers, and the brit, french and america secret services were sabatoging the revolution every chance they could- even when we were allied. If Berlin was 300 miles inside what became East Germany, then where the hell did 'West Berlin' come from? How could millions of left leaning democratic countrys veterans, who ADMIRED the USSR for surviving nazism despite everything, how could they just suddenly forget the war and allow fascists like Dulles and Hoover and prescot bush and so on just take over the debate? The USSR was desperate to share in the Marshal Plan in 1946, but were systemically demonised in a well crafted scheme that still going on today. THe fascists murdered FDR shortly before end of the war because he wasn't rightwing enough- and no one said a damn thing! They later murdered JFK, the 1st Pope John Paul and...well you get the picture. they were rolling long ago. The truth will never be exposed, if only because it would not be believed. BTW man did land on the moon...

when I have some time. Sounds conspiracy theoryish.

… And, by "it", I mean all the categories you emphasized the American people were waking up to, in particular, warfare and how the world might sustain civil societies…

Kennedy was moving us boldly… perhaps too boldly, in that general direction. Had he not been such a threat to sustained militarization and the cold war, which always perpetuates warfare, we would have progressed.

This is the one day we should think about JFK's potential to evolve the relationships between the superpowers and how we have BLOWN it.

I think we should concentrate not so much as to who killed this president, but why.

Then, I would think how much we would have progressed as a society about the balance of "left", "right", civil rights, campaign finance reform, and the chance of overcoming world hegemony.

you might also be wrong. For all that JFK was, I'm not sure the course of this country would have been that much different had he had a chance at a second term in office. Vietnam was still just about inevitable by this date in 1963, and much swung on that disastrous conflict. JFK was a President of his times, and the times might well have dictated what he did.

We'll never know, of course.

...JFK was serious about getting "all Americans" out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 was the memo that makes that clear. Kennedy had made it quite clear the summer of 63 in a famous speech - http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BWC7I4C9QUmLG9J6I8oy8w.aspx

NSAM 263 (Kennedy) was reversed by NSAM 273 (LBJ).

What I find most offensive because not enough of us do our homework on this event, was the work that Senior Administration Officials and Senior Military personnel worked on as a draft of NSA 273. It demonstrates to me they may have had foreknowledge of the plot to assassinate JFK.

Don't take my word for it. Here's the link for the draft of 273, which, BTW, was dated November 21st, 1963, less than 24 hours before the assassination.

http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html

Homosexuality was a considered a mental disorder at that time also.

Thanks for writing this up.

I forgot to include that, I'm afraid. There was plenty of discrimination and maltreatment even without considering that, though. I like today's news a lot better than news from 1963 with regard to LGBT rights. That's one of the things that is finally working out, thank goodness.