Originally Posted by
adhoc
Anyone alive back then? What was the feeling of seeing a USA president assassinated on TV? I can’t imagine that happening now. The amount of shitstorm that caused must have been insane.
Quite a few of us were alive back then and most at work. But you need to put the period in context.
First, the cavalcade was not on live TV except maybe on local Dallas stations. It was a relatively un-newsworthy event of local interest only.
And it was only one of a whole string of "shitstorm events" over a two decade or so period. There were assassinations and attempted assassinations of most of the leaders of the Labor and Integration and anti-war political figures; Malcom X, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George Lincoln Rockwell (how many folk remember there was an American Nazi Party at the time), Fred Hampton (shot while in bed by the Chicago police), a time when police regularly turned fire hoses and dogs and beatings and clubbing on US citizens, when lynchings still happened and even if tried the perpetrators were found not guilty, when the National Guard opened fire on students on a college campus.
It was a time when whole cities were burning, when a mayor ordered a row house occupied by civil rights protestors fire bombed, when domestic terrorist groups were planting bombs in banks and McDonalds and malls.
It was a time when we had just sat on the edge of total nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union; literally wondering if we would get the news first on TV or the flash in the window.
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