And Help Us All
As the nation commemorates the fifty years since the passing of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic President of the US, a few thoughts come to mind as Clinton and Obama go to Arlington to pay respects. There are a hundred or so Kennedy relatives, nieces, nephews, cousins, second cousins, who will commemorate in their own ways, and roll their eyes at other's efforts who feign a familiarity with the Camelot couple. The family knew him. We can only marvel at a distance. Some like myself were only born the year he was elected and so we lived our whole lives with the mythology and memories of others recounting.
There are things that impress us. I am struck by in particular The Flame at Arlington which is eternally lit. The Flame-as if to say, you can kill the man but the light will always carry on. The causes that JKF seems to stand for never die but shout from his grave all the louder. Justice, Equality, Fairness, Opportunity, the very bedrock of the American experiment found their expression in this President. He was smart, easy on the eyes, Harvard educated, and a decorated real war hero. All those things come to mind- but at the time of his death, what strikes me particularly are a few things aside from the obvious pain of his wife: the eternal flame, may his memory never cease, and the red shoes John Jr. and Caroline wore as they stood by their mother in front of Saint Matthews Cathedral in Washington, DC watching their father in a box be loaded onto a hearse. Red is the color of martyrs. JFK was a martyr. The motivation for his killing came from a purely evil place even if we do not know for certain the magnitude of circumstances surrounding his killer or killers. One thing we do know, it was pure evil.
So it was fitting for his children to wear the red shoes of Martyrdom in honor of their father.
And like all Martyrs, people who died directly or indirectly for standing tall and firm for what they believed in, and got shot down in the process, there is a very special place in heaven for him. So he is still with us but from a place with a better view.
John F. Kennedy, pray for us all.
http://vincentisms.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-f-kennedys-presidential-style.html
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