Now we are old and much water has flowed under our bridges. What had been unthinkable to us in 1963, what jerked us out of 'fifties somnolence and into 'sixties adulthood, today is a part of our common culture. To the present generation it is only a passing curiosity from a distant time.
A friend from high tech. days had been a youth in Central Europe in 1963. He had been transfixed, as were we all. He devoured every news item. At the time, of course, the possibility of ever being in Dallas had seemed as remote as going to the far side of the moon.
Now an engineer in his middle years and employed out on the cutting edge of North American high tech., he had had the very odd experience of going to Dallas twice for the company. The opportunity presented of fulfilling that dream of youth.
He contributed the photographs of his visit to expand this page.
...
Note the "X" on the pavement in the right hand photograph. The left hand photograph is made from that spot.
Yes. "The Window". On that floor and behind those windows he reports that
there is a museum. One cannot actually approach the window, it is screened off.
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To us it matters so very much but what does it mean to the two students leaning over university texts in a coffee shop? They looked up from a discussion over their books, saw a saggy old face at the next table, which would know, and enquired whether Johnson had preceded or followed Eisenhower.
We are from half a century ago. We are just as divorced from today as were those old people whom we remember so well from our own youth; those old people who insisted on telling us time and again about city streets filled with horses, movies without sound and how Charles Lindbergh reached Paris. What were they on about? All that had nothing to do with us. Why did they persist so? It was something for them, not for us. This was today: everybody had a car and men were flying beyond Mach 1. It all had nothing to do with us. Leave us alone.
Oh, yeah, and remember how we should not watch so much television? It would rot out not only our eyes but our brains as well. Can you remember the debate on how close to the c.r.t. children should be able to sit? Now radio had virtue, you see, because the listener had to use his imagination when listening whereas television left nothing to the imagination and so the mind was not exercised. What had their parents told them? Probably not to listen to so much radio because it rotted out the mind and to get back to reading books because that exercised the intellect!
Do we understand now why they were so insistent? They were terrified that the world was racing away from them. Two cars in every garage, trans Atlantic airliners and television were everyday matters for us. For them, if the thinking of youth were not arrested in its orientation to today, the background of those elderly was going to be irrelevant. They had to restore the old world. If today's world were accepted as valid, then they and their values were irrelevant.
Now our background is just as irrelevant. It is not important to tell them that you used a slide rule.
The events in Dallas are as distant to today's youth as was the Boer War to us.
We are the residuum of the evaporated 'sixties.
