The Discovery Channel is on Channel 142 here in Guiyang and it featured the “New Information” recently released from the national archives after 50 years.  It was about the same stuff I remember from 50 years ago.  I suppose there are a lot of Chinese that don’t know what happened 50 years ago.  It is amazing how I was only age 12, and I still have it burned into memory, better than what happened to me last week.

Today I wonder how the world would have been different if there hadn’t been the cynical hatred that led to the killings of the 1960s (Bobby and Jack Kennedy, MLK et al). Would we have stayed in Vietnam? Would there have been race riots? I think about the Rolling Stones  “Sympathy for the Devil”  lyrics about “Who Killed the Kennedys?”. Well does it make sense to wonder what it would be like to live in a world without tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes? Hatred is a force of nature.

Living in a foreign country doesn’t take away the feelings of being an American. It accentuates many feelings.  We are protected from the day to day grind  of 24 hour news, but we have more time to ponder what is it like to be a citizen of the USA and a citizen of the World. Well this is an emotional time for all of us old farts I guess . . .