Opinion

My opinion Paul Greenberg: Nov. 22 changed us forever

Nov. 22. In the middle of the car wreck or the plunge down the mountainside, like in the mind of the drowning, time slows, then stops - the way it does for some Americans every year when the page of the calendar is torn away and today's date revealed: Nov. 22. It is always 12:29 Dallas time when the motorcade comes into sight. Nothing ever changes in the immutable past, no matter how much we want it to. Captured forever in the Zapruder film we can't stop watching: Click. The presidential limousine coming down Houston makes a sharp left onto Elm. Click. The president is smiling, waving. Click. Mrs. Kennedy looks at him with concern. Click. A bystander jerks his head suddenly toward Dealey Plaza. Click. The limousine is lost behind a street sign. Click. The president reaches for his throat, slumps toward his wife. Click. The governor of Texas, seated in front of the president, falls forward. Click. Mrs. Kennedy rises. Click. She is pushed back into the car by a Secret Service agent. Click. The limousine disappears from view beneath an underpass, heading for Parkland Hospital and history. The film runs 15 seconds. And an eternity. None of us will forget where we were when we heard. I was riding a subway to a job interview in Manhattan. A dirty, disheveled man came down the aisle, but he leaned over, whispered something in my ear and moved on to whisper it to the next passenger and the next, and the next. It took a while to make meaning of the slurred words, and then absorb them: "They shot Kennedy in Dallas … They shot Kennedy in Dallas … They shot Kennedy in Dallas… ." I could see him enter the next car and do the same. Like the chorus of a Greek tragedy telling the tale. At last, he knew something no one else did - for the moment. I walked up out of the subway station in Lower Manhattan to see a man about a job, and everything seemed dirtier than usual, the din even more depressing as I walked the couple of blocks to the gray building. The old editor I was meeting seemed defeated. We didn't talk about the job. Instead we looked out the office window and watched Manhattan's flags being lowered to half-staff across the skyline, as the word spread and the afternoon light turned yellow in New York's canyons. Certain days stay in the mind. Like a film that is unwound and replayed again and again. As much as you'd like to stop it. Each time. But you can't. Years later, the phone would ring, and I would turn the television on to see the jetliners strike the buildings again and again. In an endless loop. As much as you'd like to stop it, to turn it off, you can't. To watch the Zapruder film is like that. It is to see the destruction of the temple again and again. Nothing ever changes. It is always 12:29, Dallas time, Nov. 22, 1963. Never again, one thought at the time, would Americans take their country so lightly, their institutions so for granted. But time passes and fortune changes, and some years the day passes almost unnoticed. Then some new crisis erupts, like Sept. 11, 2001, and people are reminded again of how fragile society is. We are jerked awake and realize that our way of life is not a machine that runs by itself after all, but one that requires daily heroism. Sometimes, as on every Nov. 22 and Sept. 11, even in the good years, it doesn't take a crisis to remind the nation of the fragility of life and power, but just a date on the calendar …