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!