Thanksgiving

On Friday morning, November 22, some Harvard and Radcliffe students went to the Atlantic Ocean to make a short film. Periodically, one of the cast arose from the water wearing the sign, "The End Is At Hand." At one p.m., as the filming concluded, he came out of the water wearing the sign, "The End Is Here." The students then returned to Cambridge to learn the news.

It was a week of madness and catastrophe, of horror and pathos. The assassination of the thirty-fifth President of the United States throbbed like a leitmotif through the mind of the nation, but again and again people lapsed into silence, incomprehending in the face of lesser counterpoints of insanity and pain.

Aldous Huxley died Friday in California. Senator Goldwater flew on to Washington after attending the funeral of his mother-in-law in Indiana.

The next day, Saturday, November 23, President Johnson proclaimed a national day of mourning. A fire in an Ohio rest home killed 63 elderly patients. A man watching television stabbed his father-in-law to death when the father-in-law disparaged Kennedy. In Washington, it poured rain, for the first time in weeks.

Sunday, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald point blank, the Boston strangler struck again in Lawrence. In Washington, the rain continued. The Sunday New York Times carried the following filler: "Because of poverty and food shortage in many countries, the World Food Congress estimates that 10,000 persons are dying daily from malnutrition or starvation."

On Monday, when John F. Kennedy was buried, John Jr. became three years old. Today is Caroline Kennedy's birthday, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

To know of reasons to give thanks is each man's privilege, and each will know the reasons that are his. One reason, theoretical a week ago, now will be shared by all: it is that the American government of men by laws administered by men transcends all those who animate it. Because the people do accept this reason, the lives we led, we lead still. The country suffers sadness, not hysteria; tragedy, not chaos. For that, one can be grateful.