First, my apologies to Mr. Buckley, I have nowhere near the ability to turn a phrase as he did. Secondly, this is a brief tribute to Tony Dow who was the big brother to an entire generation - go in joy.
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Chapter Twelve: The Pulse of the Nation
From the Wall Street Journal; December 8th, 1963 an editorial by William F. Buckley, Jr.:
In Charles Dickens’ classic,
A Christmas Carol, the chief protagonist of the story, Ebenezer Scrooge is haunted by three spirits which show him the true meaning of Christmas. For the past two and a half weeks the past two and a half weeks the people of America have also been haunted by not three but two spirts, their names are uncertainty and anxiety.
These are two ghosts that we as Americans are all too familiar with living as we do in the shadow of the Cold War. But, for the most part we have managed to put the aside and ignore then as we get on with our lives.
But the events of November 22nd have cast a whole new light on these two specters.
Our uncertainty now comes from a mistrust of what we are hearing out of Washington. It has been over two weeks and still a clear picture has not emerged of the events that occurred in Dealey Plaza and on Love Field.
This is unnerving to Americans who have come to expect that questions and problems are expected to be answered or resolved quickly. Perhaps we had hoped that such matters would be resolved in the same amount of time as it might take Wally Cleaver to resolve a problem he has with a date, or as Rick Nelson might resolve how to deal with a problem at school. As much as we would wish it otherwise the difficulties of our lives cannot be solved in a neat 30-minute period as they are on
Leave it to Beaver or
Ozzie and Harriet.
In the November 22nd assassination of President Kennedy and the shootings of Vice-President Johnson and presidential aide Ken O’Donnell we have a complex situation. And complex situations by their very nature require more then 30 minutes to unravel and understand.
Unlike on television and in movies where the heroes and villains are usually easily identifiable and the motives for each are quickly understood, in the present situation the American public is faced with ambiguity piled upon ambiguity.
Who are the players in the present drama? Is it as some believe the K.G.B.? Is it Cuba in the form of either a pro-Castro faction or an anti-Castro faction which seeks revenge for the bungled Bay of Pigs fiasco? There is even the fear that this may be the result of shadowy figures operating to defend what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.
The fact that as of yet so little information has been released to the American people has caused many to speculate not only on the groups just mentioned being responsible but has also provoked more bizarre speculations on the people responsible for the November 22nd tragedies.
Of course, this feeds into our second specter, anxiety. Anxiety by its very definition is not a fear based on any one thing but rather an overall dread and feeling that things are not as they are supposed to be.
We have a gnawing fear that we cannot trust those who give us information. Likewise, we have a growing dread that we are being carried along by events that are totally out of our control by forces we do not understand.
And as our anxiety grows it causes us to further fuel uncertainty by adding to the various speculations from our own anxious minds.
Worse, this sort of anxiety can also produce a third specter, one named distrust, which can grow like a canker among us sapping any confidence we might have in our institutions.
Having diagnosed the problem, we now seek a cure. And the cure for both uncertainty and anxiety comes in the form of knowledge and understanding. We need to demand a truthful accounting starting from the government in Dallas to the government in Washington and perhaps even the government in Moscow. Only thus can we banish the two specters of uncertainty and anxiety and the potential specter of distrust.