Junior moments
“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” — Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking with the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Well, actually, we don’t all remember. Many of us are able to retrieve this piece of information as a historical fact, the way that we know the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. But almost no one in this country under the age of 45 has a vivid personal recollection of the tragic events of that time: where they were when they heard the news, how the public and the press responded, the subsequent national mourning and grief.
“Even as our generation grows older,” one of my friends remarked when we were in college, “people still think of us as young because we don’t remember the assassinations of the 60’s. We missed the signal events of the last several decades.” These days, I work at a university, and some of our students now have parents who are too young to recall the day when RFK died.
If, for the sake of argument, we use the widely accepted definition of the Baby Boom as our guide and say that anyone born on or after January 1, 1965 would be considered too young to clearly remember the events of June 1968, here are some people we could expect to have a “junior moment”:
- Economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt
- Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling
- CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper
- Current James Bond star Daniel Craig
- D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee
- Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal
- Top-grossing independent film director Tyler Perry
- The founders of Google, Yahoo!, and eBay
Every one of these individuals is too young to personally remember Bobby Kennedy’s untimely demise at the age of 42 — because they’re all no older than 42 themselves.
It may be difficult for us to imagine at the moment, but someday there will be voters who have no personal recollection of where they were on September 11, 2001. Watch for them starting in 2016, just two presidential terms from now.
