The Decade When We Murdered All Our Saviors

Okay, assassinated is a more accurate word, because they were all political killings.

I was in my thirties back then, newly married, raising a family, and inspired by what I heard from President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and a black preacher I was only becoming acquainted with, name of Martin Luther King, Jr.

My political education was probably somewhat in its infancy then, but my landscape architectural practice was thriving and the future looked pretty much like a rosy peach.

In what seemed an eternal damnation, it all disappeared like sand underfoot.

President Kennedy was the first, smiling one moment from a motorcade in Dallas, and then gone in a blur of bloodshed, sirens and mayhem, his wife Jackie holding his already lifeless body. We hadn’t lost a president this way since Lincoln, and no one was alive today to remember that. We simply did not do those things anymore.

Of particular interest to me, since their near-miss of potential conflict after the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had opened a private, back-channel correspondence, outside the peering eyes of their governments, to negotiate nuclear disarmament. That may not have been in the best interests of the military industrial profiteers.

Kennedy’s plans to end the Vietnam war paint a picture of a president who had made powerful enemies across the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and Cold War hardliners. Investigations by Congress and other authorities were removed from public scrutiny for 50 years, without any credible excuse, and extended for another 50 in 2013, adding fuel to the theory he was killed by the CIA.

Can you think of a reason for blindsiding investigation for a hundred years, when all the witnesses are dead?

Me neither.

Then came the next, and the next, and the next.

Two years later, Malcom X was shot 21 times at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted, though two of the three were later exonerated after evidence revealed both police and FBI misconduct and suppressed evidence. Malcolm had recently broken with the Nation after a pilgrimage to Mecca and his evolving views on race and activism.

Attorneys have argued that a member of BOSSI (a covert intelligence unit within the NYPD), reported having witnessed what appeared to be a rehearsal for the assassination a week or so before it happened. The FBI and NYPD, they allege, were aware of credible threats to Malcolm X’s life but ensured he remained vulnerable in the days leading up to his murder. Make what you care to of those quasi-governmental dark forces that move against the interests of White America.

Three years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King had come to support striking sanitation workers. James Earl Ray, a white rascist, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years. King’s death sparked riots in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Thirty-one years later (these things take time, you know), a civil jury found that a conspiracy involving local Memphis police and federal agencies contributed to his death — a verdict largely overlooked by mainstream media. His assassination accelerated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, an Act the Supreme Court has found a need to pretty much destroy earlier this year.

These things take time, you know.

As I mentioned, what took nearly 200 years to achieve, comes apart quite quickly.

Any fool with a chainsaw can cut down in minutes a tree that took 300 years to grow…lessons to be learned…saviors are not unlike trees

Two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, the former president’s brother, was shot, minutes after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.

Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by a Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant, who was angry over U.S. support for Israel. Kennedy died the following day. His death ended what many believed was the most viable path to ending the Vietnam War through electoral politics.

That was not to be, because a man was angry and no one gave a shit at the moment…at least no one who was charged with protection. Fancy that.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the last of the famous family brothers, finally died in 2009 of a normal, peaceful death.

The fingerprints of the CIA, which Harry Truman had named ‘the American Gestapo,’ remain markedly present on each killing during this unprecedented decade of murder, mayhem and criminal activity.

It’s as if the old days of Mafia gangland killings were in reboot. You have to be pretty old to have a memory of those times, probably seventy by now, but that era of our American history is too easily erased in the common memory by moon landings, unwon wars, and financial disasters.

Now, of course, even that history is under attack by those who would remove it from the public memory…such as it is.

In his first week in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors. These executive orders are (and were) designed to chill and prohibit lawful efforts to advance equal opportunity.

They attempt to do so by spreading disinformation and distorting federal laws to advance an agenda based on division and hate.

No one remembers.

And the band plays on…