It's coming up next Friday, and I'd like to help with that op-ed or blog post you might have in the works.
1. Don't repeat the cliché that everyone who was around at the time remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news.
2. Don't tell us — especially don't tell us as if it were not a big cliché — what you happened to have been doing and how you've always remembered that. After 50 years, can you not finally see that it doesn't matter?
3. Don't even attempt to say that the assassination had a profound effect on people. There is no new way to say that. We know!
4. Don't make up alternate histories of what would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed. Everything would have been different; we would all have been different. If you're American and under 50, you can assume that you would never have been born.
5. Don't recount the conspiracy theories. Here's Wikipedia's article on the subject. If you're into that sort of thing, enjoy it some day in your spare time, but don't lard your 50th anniversary writings with that. It's tawdry and undignified, and we've heard it all a thousand times. And by "all," I don't really mean all. What's the one about the Federal Reserve? I just mean, if that's what you've found to talk about, just shut up.
6. Don't connect the story of JFK to Obama. I know it seems as though everything is about Obama, but resist. It's cheap and inappropriate.
7. Don't tell us about other Kennedys. Don't drag in the recent news that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's son Jack appears to have reached adulthood in nonugly form and has grown a large head of hair and is therefore presumptive presidential material. That's annoying and off-topic.
8. Don't commemorate murder. A man managed to kill the President. He's already gotten far too much press. He doesn't deserve our endless attention. I'm sick of "celebrating" a death day. We don't make anything of Lincoln's death day. We celebrate his birthday, like Washington's, because he was such a great President. We don't celebrate JFK's birthday — I don't even know what it is — because he was not great enough. We celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday, not the day he was assassinated. Why? Because of his greatness, and because we don't want to direct our attention toward his murder. So why do we focus on Kennedy's death day? It must be because he was not great enough, and because of points #1, #2, and #3, above. It's about ourselves. A man died and we morbidly relive it annually, for some reason that must make little sense to those under 50.
9. Do write to end the annual ritual of death commemoration. Nail down the coffin lid and give the dead President some peace. Inspire us to move on to modest acknowledgements of the date at 10 or 25 year intervals up until 2063, when we — those of us who survive — can go big for the centennial.
10. Do make it — if not original — short.
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