Which shooting affected you the most?

....in my case JFK, MLK and RK

and those are my 3 choices, as well.

mine as well..and in same order.

They were assassinated the same time the radical right was in it's infancy.

My question now is, who are the great leaders for the first half of the 21st century?

regardless of the findings of any commission, I believe it was perpetrated by the Radical Right. Period. Same with MLK and RFK.

I honestly believed that Bobby Kennedy would be president and then he would join Dr. King and make racism and discrimination a thing of the past (ok, I was naive.)
Then they both died. Teen angst? Curt Cobain had nothing on me.
To make matters much, much worse, we wound up with Nixon.
And so began a long deliberate slide into darkness.

it still effected me. JFK was a wonderful guy and same with RFK. I always imagine what it would be like if they were still a live and Mr. King. *sigh* :cry:

Said better than I could - by Senator Edward Kennedy on June 8th, 1968 in Bobby Kennedy's eulogy:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

"Those of us, who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.

"As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'"

JFK was tapped by his father to "replace" Joe Jr. as the golden child, but RFK was the REAL thing -- he wasn't a politician; he was a leader. And Teddy will always have my respect because of that eulogy ...

How I wish we could lure RFK Jr. into politics ... OK, I'm throwing it out here: How about a John Edwards/RFK Jr. ticket in '08? (The second coming coupled with the son ... ) !!!!

And it's only gotten worse since then, decade after decade.

JFK's assassination hit me hard, but I was still a child --
RFK and MLK being assasinated in the same year (I was a teen by then, and politically aware) was horrifying -- it felt like we were going to keep on descending, and that hope was gone.

If I was 15 or even 10 years older you can bet it'd be JFK.

Close to where I live. Know someone who died in the shooting.

So its the only one I remember.

effect overall would be JFK. Even though it was before I was born.

I could no longer react to othed such murders with "normal" intensity. To me, the world suddenly turned evil, and hasn't gotten much better to this day. It's a cliche of course, but NOTHING really shocks me any more.

pnorman

It affected me enormously.

As horribly tragic as JFK's murder was, what happened in 1968 stands out in higher relief. The U.S. was blowing apart at the seams: Vietnam, student unrest, civil-rights confrontations, the gender-equity revolution, etc. If ever progressive leadership was needed to steer this country through difficult shoals, it was in 1968.

But MLK and RFK were cut down, and Nixon became president. The assassinations of 1968 started an insane sequence of events that Americans are reeling from to this day.

I was 14 and remember feeling punched in the gut when I heard this on the radio. I called home crying to my mother "they are killing all the good guys". It was my single defining moment of awakening into the larger and political world. I remember MLK being shot and all the upset around it, his shooting is what led to my realization of the world after RFK got shot (the 2 in combination).

I was too young to remember much about JFK though my parents told me he was a tool, responsible for much good and much bad and Bobby was the one with true vision and individual possibilities.

I don't remember Malcom X (ND was pretty white and conservative back then). The others were trite though I did feel bad at Lennon's it didn't affect me.

n/t

I wasn't old enough to vote (17) in '68, but volunteering for Bobby's campaign was my first involvement in politics.

and it seems like yesterday. My 3rd grade teacher walked into our class crying and told us what happened. I can barely remember what happened yesterday, but that day and the weeks that followed are still vivid in my mind. My mom cried for days. We lived in front of the TV to see what was happening. It was a dark time in our history. :(

horrifies me most of all. I had a child around that age then, and I remember being so terrified it would happen here I couldn't concentrate, and the grief I felt for the parents almost overwhelmed me. For a few days I would go on lunch break and drive past my daughter's school, just to feel safer.

I was only a block or two away at my charter school and they put us on lock down. What I remember thinking after I found out what had happened was that half of the kids in my school would have been candidates to do the same thing if they had remained in public school.

I'm just sayin'

Kids about my age, and not too far from where I lived (Cleveland). And a governor who was at war with my generation.

(But the deaths of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King were also devastating.)

MLK, RFK, Kent State all blurred together. Having these be my formative yrs is why I think things have to get worse here now before they get better, though my father says things are worse now than they were then.

I was 5 at the time. It is one of my earliest memories. I recall how upset everyone was -- every single grown-up person I met. Then the solemn funeral procession on TV. It shocked me out of an innocence that every child deserves to retain a while longer.

Second is 9-11. I lived in the NY metro area at the time. But at that point, after the long procession of worldwide atrocities observed between JFK and 9-11, well, as a nation we bounce along a bottom we hit a long time ago.

I took it, rightly it seems now, as an omen of dark times to come.

I was in 7th grade at the time, and when we got the news he'd been shot the whole classroom cheered. We were such snots :P

You might also want to add Pope John Paul II on there.

:tinfoilhat: