Father Gordon MacRae: The Day the Earth Stood Still

...There were rumblings of change in the world before JFK’s death. On March 18 in that same year, the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer from public schools. In the second grade, Mrs. Walsh had begun each day by reading Psalm 23. We were better off for hearing it. In the third grade, Mrs. Eisenberg recited a Hebrew Berakah. We were better off for hearing that as well. We had no sense that the age of the individual had dawned, and our collective welfare – the very soul of our nation – was to be set aside to accommodate it.

Nancy Reagan once said, “The ’60’s was the worst time in history to bring up children.” In the six years from 1963 to 1969, the storm of my adolescence raged upon a chaotic sea. Each successive wave of change, fueled by crisis, smashed away at the remnants of consistency and order. If you were an adolescent in the 60’s, then you remember how the chaos inside seemed to mirror the chaos outside. And what was going on outside was brutal. It’s all a jumble of memory...

Read the rest of Father Gordon's excellent post here