I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER

In a quick backward glance I am driving my Mustang on the Nimitz Freeway near Hayward California . I'm on my way to my first teaching assignment, barely older than my students, and I am singing along with Dionne Warwick: while combing my hair now, and wond'ring what dress to wear now, I say a little prayer for you....
To me the song is about Vietnam. I don't have a boyfriend or husband fighting there but I keep the boys in my heart; they are my friends, my classmates, my contemporaries. I want them to come home. They do not belong in this war they cannot - and perhaps should not - win.
I can't see ahead and so I don't know the violence, the losses, the tragedies that await us in 1968. We have already been unspeakably changed by the assassination four years before. We Baby Boomers, who for the most part lived a golden, sheltered life in the fifties with Howdy Doody on the tiny TV screen and doting parents who rented cotton candy machines on Halloween and took us to a fledgling Disneyland...we now knew that bad things can happen, that terrible events can transform us, but in 1967 we don't yet know that the ripples from that poisoned pebble will expand throughout our lives and muddy the waters decades later. It is not an easy fix. There is no closure for this kind of wound.
I say a little prayer for you.
Today, I say one for Barack Obama and all of our candidates. I say one every morning. Because I know bad things can happen, and I know hateful people always live among us. And I am disturbed by the language I am hearing in the McCain campaign. The tenor of the talk has become feverish and infused with meanness. I am worried, I am frightened by it.
I am waiting for John McCain to step up and ask his followers to stop it.
Because John McCain knows bad things can happen. He has lived through them. He remembers.
Sarah Palin does not. Sarah Palin is proud of being in the second grade when Joe Biden was already in Congress. Sarah Palin thinks youth and ignorance are prizes to be worn like beauty contest sashes.
Sarah Palin was not yet born when a shot from a rifle rang through the Dallas morning and cut down a young president. She cannot know the great grief that never quite heals. The place in the heart that one carries in silence. The assassination of a president, regardless of one's political leanings, is something that hurts and in many cases hardens. The death of John Kennedy robbed a generation of its youth and much of its idealism.
Sarah Palin was four years old when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were gunned down. She cannot understand. There was anger in the land, an unpopular war and an ineffective, hated president in the White House. There was indecision, worry, and strong words among the people.
Some politicians used the fear in the land to advance their own causes. Anger was condoned, racial slurs and half truths abounded. Rumors spread rapidly, even without our instant internet communication. Violence marred a political convention and blood ran in the streets.
And today, in an atmosphere of strife, economic disaster and an unpopular war, the most disliked president in our history sits helplessly on the sidelines while another campaign draws to its conclusion. And out of desperation, out of a sense that they must win at any cost, again the comments are being made.
They are reckless comments. They use a candidate's middle name because it conjures a hated dictator. They imply that a candidate "pals around with terrorists." They suggest that he is dangerous. They cast doubts. They play on fear and pander to the worst in their supporters.
I ask John McCain to stop. I ask him to tutor and rein in his young vice presidential nominee.
She thinks that whatever she says, she can say freely and without consequence. She does not know the horror of the consequences and I pray she never learns.
She does not know that her words can reap the whirlwind.
I remind my fellow Boomers to tell the story. Share the pain and the lesson with a new generation, who only read of John Kennedy in dusty history books. Who don't remember Robert Kennedy's campaign born of sorrow, or Martin Luther King's devotion to his cause.
Tell the story you carry in your heart. Quiet the noise, take a deep breath, step back.
Both campaigns : have respect for one another. Our country cannot bear another tragic loss. Keep all of our candidates safe, let them fulfill their destinies whatever those may be. Let them sail these treacherous waters with all of us as ballast. Let all participants in the political wars show responsibility and restraint.
I say a little prayer.