November 22, 1963. I was in college in Colorado Springs. I had just finished lunch. When I walked into the dishroom to return my tray, one of the food service workers ran up to me and said "L'il Bit, have you heard, the President's been shot!" It is with deep shame that I recall my flip answer -- "It was probably my daddy who did it" -- but I was Dallas-bred, a few days shy of my 19th birthday, and completely unable to grasp what had just happened. Our parents had lived through the Great Depression and fought World War II. They had conquered all the evils of the world, and used the peace and prosperity that resulted from their struggles to protect us from all harm and shower us with everything we wanted. If the President had been shot, it was no more than a graze to the shoulder. Bad things did not, could not, happen in the world we all knew.

I went on to my class. There was no professor, just a bunch of thoroughly bewildered students who had all heard the same news and were beginning to grasp that something profoundly awful had happened. After about twenty minutes, the professor came into the class. Looking back, I am sure he was dressed normally, but in my memory he was dishelveled, hair awry, looking as though he'd been struggling through a thicket. He said "What are you doing here! Haven't you heard, the President's been shot! Go home. Go watch tv."

We did go back to our dorms, and for days we watched tv. We saw Jackie Kennedy in her blood-stained suit, standing beside Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office. We saw her again a few days later, walking with amazing strength behind her husband's cortege. We saw John-John salute his father's casket. And we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas City Jail.

As much as I grieved for the President -- because, despite my instinctive sassiness when I first heard the news, I had come to deeply respect him and believe in what he stood for -- the worst thing, for me, was Ruby shooting Oswald. We were studying Plato in my philosophy class at that time, and the contrast between a society of laws and the anarchy represented by Ruby's action was so stark, and so frightening, that it shook me to my soul. It was in those few days that I put together an ethical framework for my life. I believe that the only hope for civilization is a society in which laws are respected and obeyed. We can work to change laws we don't like, but we cannot pick and choose which ones we will obey.

The world changed that November day. That sense that nothing bad could ever happen vanished in the blink of an eye. The young President who inspired us to be better than we were-- "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask instead what you can do for your country" --and who challenged us to blaze new trails-- "A man on the moon in this decade"-- was gone. When the ideals of youth are extinguished so abruptly, bad things result, and so they did: riots, assassinations, excessive drug use, a breakdown of traditions and families.

John Kennedy left us with some good things, for those of us old enough to remember, and those young enough to discover him. He believed in democracy. He believed in the people. And he believed that if we would all put in the effort, we could accomplish great things.

May he rest in peace.