Certain aspects of what happened after the JFK assassination were nice, and exciting, and appealing, for sure.
The Beatles, the pop music explosion, were wonderful, to be sure. My transistor radio was my internet. Late at night, I would listen in the dark, through my pillow. Through it, the world opened up to me. So many things to discover.
Within a year, I saw an operating laser for the first time. As soon as I saw that strange, speckled light, I saw scientific magic with my own eyes.
The space program, of course, was a source of constant excitement. Undersea exploration was very much on my mind. The Thresher disaster earlier in 1963 had literally sickened me. The picture of that one plastic boot cover on the floor of the Atlantic.
But under it all was the sense of loss and dread that I picked up from my parents. The people's choice for President had been taken away from us by force. The guy who took Kennedy's place was awful. Pandora's Box opened; the Gulf of Tonkin incident, escalation, the Daisy Ad, so much else that was bad. Charles Whitman, killing 17 before he was killed by the police.
A few years later, in early 1970, I heard Country Joe McDonald sing these words
Well come on Wall Street don't move slow
Why man, this is war-a-go-go
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade...
At the time I heard them, at age 14, I thought they were silly, just more of the "commie gobbledegook" I had begun to learn to detect at that age (although I didn't call it that).
But now, almost 60 years later, I believe Joe McDonald was really onto LBJ. I don't know how he knew, but I think he was right on the money. The Domino Theory and the fear of Communist World Domination was in there for sure, but LBJ ramped up the war in Vietnam to help his industrial friends back in Texas. Everything he did was to help his pals at LTV and Convair and Bell Helicopter, and many others. Halliburton and the oil boys, and many others.
And the nasty consequences of that war still reverberate today. To list them all would take hours to read; they've been catalogued by better writers than I, as I'm sure you know.
But that's the "unpleasant future" to which I referred.
If it hadn't been for the absolute mess made of that war by the LBJ admin and Congress, bin Laden would never have had the nerve to attack us.