It was four years later after President John F. Kennedy
went down by the grassy knoll across the downtown book depository when I first
whiffed a lungful of Big D's arid air. We had taken exception to the
irrelevant type of theological reflection we encountered in the backwoods of
Kentucky in '65, and since we were not inclined to join the denominational
services of religion, I quit perusing Thomas' tome!
Before heading back out to the Orient, however, a friend
in Chicago told me to get in touch with a former Manila missionary who was
then in-charge of students' affairs at a Theology School in Dallas, Texas,
reportedly more open-minded than the warm-hearted but parochial one I had west
of the Appalachia.
Having been lured into the Protestant chapel by the likes
of John A. T. Robinson's invitatory Honest to God, and the fresh winds
of biblical scholarship and practical spirituality offered by theologs (sorry
girls, church patriarchy of the 60s was firmly in place) like the NT scholar
Rudolf Bultmann, the evangelical Dietrich Bonheoffer, the urbane Paul Tillich
and the New England ethicists, the Niebuhr brothers, with collegial welcome
from Vatican II, Hans Kung and the venerable Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, I was
not inclined to master the litany of classical pat answers as I was eagerly
intent in sharpening realistic and authentic life questions.
In the Dallas of '67, I was shocked to find out that JFK
was still one of Dallas' least-favored Presidents; there were some who
actually held Lee Harvey Oswald as some kind of a folk hero! A block
from my dorm was home to the John Birch Society. To their credit, the
members did look like children of the washed and well off, clean-shaven and
neck-tied. My anticolonial third world political orientation was not one
of their favored homebrew. The school, in spite of its laissez fair
scholastic tradition was still a denominational school for pastors of local
congregations, and some drove wearing wide brim hats in pick-ups to the school
yard displaying a rifle rack behind the driver's seat.
We remember this because November 22 marks the 50th year
of the assassination of JFK in Dallas, an occasion that brought tears to our
innocent teenage eyes while we as a part-time working college student DJ'd and
read news at a local radio station in the Cagayan valley in '63.
Huff Posts recently carried an article with a JFK
hand-written speech that was to be delivered in Austin, Texas on the evening
of the fateful day. The speech's ending, addressed to the Democratic
Party in Texas, went:
Neither the fanatics nor
the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our
Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind ... So let us not
be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when
our Nation's future is at stake ... determined that this land we love shall
lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.
The voice of America's
Camelot was stilled that day before it had the chance to utter those words.
The Ivy league look of
our Methodist-related school by Central Expressway on Highland Park belied its
vaunted progressive credentials as children of families dripping in crude
drove their V-8 guzzlers on campus from spreads dotted with derricks and
cattle in the range. The studentry showed more frenzy in fraternity and
sorority traditions than the scholastic virtues of academé. Like the
manicured lawns in the surrounding homes, University yards were kept trimmed,
the buildings swept clean, and residences maintained by southern blacks and
Mejico Tejano servants who appeared properly cowed still wearing imaginary
white gloves to do their chores.
It did not take long
before our youthful gait joined the parliament of the street, holding vigil by
the flagpole with a professor prayerfully protesting the war in Vietnam; we
also walked with placards in front of a Washateria near the Hilton that
displayed a sign: "For Whites Only." As a foreign student, a mendicant
monastic in a sea of privilege and wealth, I was tolerated but was socially
kept at a distance.
The world that snuffed
JFK's breathe was alive and well in Lyndon Johnson's wide sprawl of '67 when I
tally-hoed into Highland Park. A decade later, primetime TV chronicled
the lives at Big D's Southfolks. A few years into the series, I gave up
my "JR" nickname when the character J. R. Ewing played by smirk-faced Larry
Hagman became the poster boy for Texas drawl's smarts and
cunning!
JFK's hope for new
frontiers of peace and abundance, in his view, from a nation of immigrants
to one poised to send a human to the moon, continued as the nation's
metaphor to justify military expansion, its arrogance rudely awakened by the
collapse of the twin towers of NYC one fateful day in September. The
shot that felled JFK in Dallas turned into a booming crash in New York with
repercussions haunting corridors of powers that do not tire in spit-polishing
Uncle Sam's uniformed soul.
Fifty years later, the
nation struggles with its undocumented immigrants. A message we saw on a
young boy's t-shirt would have made JFK smile: there are no immigrants
on planet earth!
Jaime Vergara
wangzhimu2031@aol.com
yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In
all,
celebrate!