On that terrible Friday the 13th, when ISIS attackers murdered at least 129 people in Paris, I tried not to watch. Instead of going home to a night of cable news, I went to Seattle to hear a musician friend play a live show.
When I met my daughter and son-in-law at the Ballard pub that night, they talked of feeling so sad that they almost cancelled.
Everything about the Paris killings was horrifying and sad. Saddest of all may be that what happened Nov. 13 wasn’t all that surprising.
How awful that we’re getting used to the brutal tactics of the so-called Islamic State. We are no longer utterly shocked by news of beheadings at the hands of masked killers, or pictures of people lined up for executions. Even the jihadists’ claim that it downed a Russian airliner with an improvised bomb, killing 124 people flying out of Egypt, seems plausible.
Coming the month after a gunman killed nine people at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College — and with news of horrific acts and their political fallout bombarding us 24 hours a day — the Paris attacks and reports about their plotters are overwhelming.
We hear echoes of 9/11, and again the drumbeats of war. A seemingly endless chain of bad news is making me feel as though these must be the worst times ever. Look at the calendar, though. This date, Nov. 22, is a solemn reminder.
— this newspaper was then delivered in the afternoon — Everett Herald readers saw this headline: “President Kennedy Is Killed! Assassin’s Bullets Cut Down Nation’s Chief Executive and Governor of Texas.”
May our nation never again suffer such a loss. Those of us who remember Nov. 22, 1963, and certainly the generations that came before us, have known times as tragic as these.
The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, devastated thousands of families and forever changed the world. Yet somehow the assassination of President John F. Kennedy still looms in my mind as the most shocking news of my lifetime.
I never forget the date, and I always remember details of that day.
My fourth-grade classmates and I learned about it at Spokane’s Jefferson Elementary School. Without knowing why, we were taken out of class, lined up and brought by tearful teachers across the playground to the cafeteria. A radio was on. One teacher got up on stage and announced that the president had been shot in Dallas.
They dismissed us early that cold, gray day. Within three more days, we watched on TV the shooting death of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of killing Kennedy, and the president’s historic funeral.
To this day, I freeze if I am watching some television show and there’s an interruption for a news bulletin. In the 1960s, words to the effect of “We interrupt this program” had the power to stun. We had learned the news could be gut-wrenching.
In 1968, the spring of my eighth-grade year, we saw within two short months the assassinations of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, and of the late president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in Los Angeles during the presidential primary campaign.
What happened on 9/11 was a different kind of shocking. At the time, we heard comparisons to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the United States into World War II.
Within a couple years of that, my father had left the University of Idaho to join the U.S. Army. He landed at Normandy just after D-Day in 1944. And by the end of the war, he was at the notorious Dachau concentration camp shortly after it was liberated. His duties there included the holding of German POWs.
Imagining what he saw, I know these aren’t the worst times ever. But from social media to round-the-clock news, there is no escaping accounts and images of terrible acts. As abhorrent as present-day tragedies are, their equal can be found in history — in the Holocaust, slavery, or torture exacted on people centuries ago.
Cruelty is nothing new. These aren’t the worst of times. All the glare and all the noise only make it seem so.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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