Looking forward, not back. By Eric Smith

We are now barely ten days away from the 50th anniversary of the tragic events in Dallas and no doubt like many of you I have spent some time reflecting on the life and legacy of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Having been born just a couple of weeks over eighteen months after the president's assassination to parents who were his contemporaries and to siblings who were either teenagers or who were about to enter their teen years at the time of his death, the immediate aftershocks of that event and the subsequent assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the president's younger brother Robert in 1968 has done much to shape my world view and my take on national and global events.

Yet as the nation's fever begins to break over its obsession with JFK and he and the New Frontier finally begins to fade into the fog of history the question for all of us now becomes whether or not it is finally time to let go of "what might have been?" Roughly 75% of those who were alive on November 22, 1963 are no longer with us and roughly 75% of those alive today were either unborn or too young to remember the events of that day. I will leave it to others far more qualified than I to pass final judgment on JFK.

However for myself I will say that this anniversary of his death, has for whatever rhyme or reason, finally compelled me to stop looking back; to stop dwelling on what might have been and mourning what was lost. The New Frontier is as ancient to us as the New Frontier of America's Old West was to President Kennedy's youth. We cannot undo the tragic events of November 22, 1963, April 4, 1968, and June 5th, 1968. All we can do by dwelling on them is to keep the wounds of these triple tragedies fresh, and pass on their attendant pain and sense of loss down from one generation to the next.

This is increasingly seeming to me like a needless burden to carry; an unnecessary agony to carry forth in our hearts and our souls. It seems to me that it is far more healthy & productive to now focus on the joy of promise rather than dwell on the sorrow of loss; especially considering that we have the ability to bring that promise to fruition and no power whatsoever to erase from history those tragic events that through the years have continued to bring us so much pain.

Therefore let us resolve not to further wallow in "what might have been" and embrace the promise of what may be for by consigning the past to the past, we will better enable ourselves to face the future; unburdened by that which we can neither change nor control, and emboldened to mold a future who's history will truly be our own.