Each Memorial Day we reflect on America’s war dead.  These days, we should also reflect on the victims of mass shootings, especially those who never had a chance to grow up.

For those of us whose childhood roots are in the 1950s each succeeding decade is a “tree ring” we can reference in judging the evolution – or devolution – of society.  For fun we rode bikes, climbed trees, and spent hours with our friends.  We took for granted the doomsday drills at school preparing us for nuclear war.  The 1957 Asian Flu was our pandemic – luckily, we survived without lockdowns or vaccines.  The Mad Bomber was the decade’s terrorist.  He was a disgruntled Con Ed worker named George Metesky who planted 33 bombs injuring 15 people from 1951 -1957.  He was caught and committed to a state mental hospital – no bail!  The USSR suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, but President Eisenhower kept his cool and the world went on.  The 1950s saw little civil violence even as Jim Crow and school segregation were challenged.  The last lynching was that of Emmet Till in 1955.  A Pax Eisenhower reigned within and outside the nation starting with the Korean Armistice (1953). 

The 1960s arrived with much promise but soon went downhill with President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco.  That led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and more doomsday fears.  Domestic terror began with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Then multiple anxieties took hold of us: Vietnam and race riots.  In 1966, we were introduced to mass murder for the first time.  Richard Speck stabbed eight nurses to death in Chicago.  Charles Whitman used a Texas clock tower to blow away 16 victims, wounding many others.  Assassinations resumed in 1968 with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and subsequently more street violence.  The 60s were terrifying.  Sex and drugs went mainstream. Only a great wave of new music and a draft deferment gave youth hope for the future.

The 1970s saw domestic terrorism rise to near routine – bombs galore.  The leftist Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican FALN left their marks. Between 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. They were typically detonated late at night, causing few injuries.  The worst, by the FALN killed four at Manhattan’s historical Fraunces Tavern in 1975.  Bomb scares were part of life in office buildings.  But by and large, our news was consumed with non-lethal things like Watergate (1972) and the Arab Oil Embargo (1973).  Under Jimmy Carter we had serious inflation, an energy crisis, national “malaise”, then capped with the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979). The porn industry took off.

The 1980s saw the shooting of President Reagan (1981), the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed 241 servicemen (1983), the Iran-Contra Scandal (1986), and the miraculous fall of the USSR (1989).  Nuclear relief!

The 1990s began with the First Iraq War (1990-91), our ominous entry into Arab and Muslim affairs – that led to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists, killing six and injuring over 1,000.  Two years later saw the worst domestic terror to date when an Oklahoma federal building was bombed killing 168 people.  By 1998, the nation took a break with the Monica Lewinsky Affair and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.  But in 1999, the nation got its taste of things to come: the Columbine school shootings that killed 13.

One count has fourteen mass shootings (so far) connected to schools and colleges, with 169 mostly kids murdered, including Tuesday’s Texas massacre.  We are all desperate to find out what the cure is for these senseless attacks – guns, mental illness, easy access to schools, social media incitement, violent movies and games, copycat crimes, broken homes, bullying, so on.  No doubt each of these or any combination could be blamed. 

For decades boys have played with toy guns and watched violent movies growing up, without inciting them to violence.   In the 1950s, we had cap guns with real gunpowder; the noise and smoke were part of the play action. And we watched endless war movies.  But we also had solid institutions, strong families, religious obligations, practical goals like a good job and marriage; we had limited media bombardment. We had fewer guns, no AR-15s, and a military draft to take 18-year-olds off the street.  It was a world away.

We miss you, Ike! -JLM