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Author's Note: Hey guys, this is my second (attempt of a) timeline. My first one ended when I realized I bit off way more than I could chew, but this is hopefully much more up my alley. Enjoy!
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“July 23, 2008...yes, I remember that day very well. It was a beautiful summer day. I was headed to go to New Hampshire for a fundraiser for Jeanne Shaheen, who was running for the Senate that year. Of course, as we know now, that fundraiser never happened.
We had just gotten off the tarmac in Manchester when the Secret Service just immediately surrounded me. They told me that I had to get back on the plane and head to D.C as soon as possible, that I couldn’t be seen in public. They were worried my safety was in danger. I demanded to know what was going on. They told me that they weren’t sure either, all they knew for sure is that I just couldn't be in public. I didn't know that my life was about to change forever; hell, I didn't know that my country was about to change forever. You know, it's kind of a cliche to say, but everything really did change that day.
The world seemed so wide and open back then. We were all hopeful that change was coming. I mean, how could we not? We were still in Iraq, the economy was about to crash. It was something effervescent. I hadn't seen it since I was in college. Everyone was united, yearning for change. African-Americans. The working class. Hispanics. Moderates. The progressives. The college students. I don't think Jerry Blanchard realized just what he did that day, just how many people he profoundly damaged.
I remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who preceded me in the Senate, had this amazing quote when he heard that John F. Kennedy had been killed. He said something along the lines of, "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time."
And we all did think that. We were all Irish that day, in a sense. In the back of our minds, we all knew that something like this could happen. But we didn’t want to believe it. We wanted to think we’d woken up from this nightmare as a country. My generation saw all of our heroes cut down in front of us. John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. But this generation? They couldn't possibly know. They didn't deserve this- well, no one did. So much hope for the future..."
(pause)
(voice breaking) So much hope, just gone forever. To this day, I don't think we've really gotten over it as a country, just how like a teenager never gets over their first love. He was our hope. And for a while there, we were hopeless."
-Hillary Rodham Clinton, 44th President of the United States, in the 2018 documentary Change We Could Believe In: The Life and Times of Barack Obama.