Understanding JFK and his challenge
By Larry Berz
I’m approaching 60 years old. My hair is quite gray, I’m rather wrinkled and eccentric. I bend down more slowly and rise up even more slowly. My reaction time is longer, my ability to process problems more problematic. My memory is more nostalgic than practical. I’ve enjoyed the wonders of childhood, school, jobs, career, love, marriage, children/grandchildren, home and house.
I’ve been exposed to aging, death, grief and dying. And taxes. My circumstantial world of affairs sounds even more impressive: Civil Rights, Vietnam, China, the atomic and hydrogen bombs, Moon landings, Liberation and Fundamentalism, Watergate, September 11th, to name a few. Now, more than ever, I’m looking for answers, big answers to understand what a dear friend, Professor Mel Gershman once posed to me years back: What’s it all about?
Somehow, a small fry like me on a pale blue dot of a planet still hopes and dreams to change this world, perhaps to improve its conduct and sensitivity- to honor our material efforts on this planet and to encourage the dear people who occupy it. I cannot think of any more important quest.
What’s daunting to consider remains the rather miserable flawed attempts of men and women impressively more qualified to execute that role than myself. That’s what leads me some 50 years too late to rather desperately wrestle to understand President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a personal way. Not the man, mind you. Historians and pundits unearthed enough controversial details about the man. No, I place my hope in assessing the ideals communicated through his unforgettable public voice that somehow sustains my dreams in an ideal American way accessible to us all.
I’m a middle aged guy now, older and crankier. In the course of the last eight months, I’ve walked some 500 miles on the highways and byways of our communities fired by a Kennedy legacy challenging us to pioneer “new frontiers” in our personal lives. Although the tragedy of November 22, 1963 haunts our better selves, the eloquence of our President’s mission should overshadow the grief his death entails. That’s a call for all of us.
Larry Berz, director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, spent late November, 1963 with his family by a small black and white television watching the death of our President Kennedy. Now he walks for new frontiers in the color of our daily lives.
