GROUND ZER0, New York, N.Y.--Nov. 22, 2003-- It was forty years I first saluted a dead president.  His name was John F. Kennedy.   My act was one of shame and intimidation, but taught me a lesson in Vigilance, one I have never forgotten.

      It was a dreary, foggy day on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene.   For months I had been screwing up enough courage to ask a fellow student out, the daughter of an English professor.
       There was a small coffee shop at the edge of the campus, frequented by students mostly.  It was a dark place, with high-backed wooden booths chipped and carved by hoards of eager-minded youths not unlike myself who passed through the halls of academia in search of some sophomoric wisdom path that might lead them to the great gates of the Truth.
       I was majoring in psychology at the time, although my heart was in writing.   I saw no future in writing and had chosen psychology as a means to an end rather than to sate some deep passion to change the world by screwing people's heads on properly.   I also think part of my motivation was to better understand myself, and the demons that haunted me.
       One of those demons, who still resides on my shoulder, was the one who hisses:  "You're not worthy!  You're a nobody!   You're a failure, a loser!"
       That vocabulary machine-gunned my thinking ever since I was a small child.    I fought it, as all children seem to, and thrust myself in the teeming swimming pool of life even though I had no idea how to swim in the turgid sea of self-worth and self-awareness.  I held to the position that what I was on the outside would disguise what I really was on the inside.   If I were to pretend I was "somebody" then I might fool the world that I was truly a "nobody."

       That's a great part of the reason it had taken me virtual months to screw up the courage to ask this young lady, whose name four decades later escapes me, to coffee for the singular purpose of blurting out the words:  "Would you like to go on a date?"
       The girl represented the "other side of the tracks."   Her mother, the English professor, symbolized "high intellectual society," and, I figured if the girl agreed to go on a date with me, I might be swept into the "upper class," but, my fear ruled my every thought that if she rejected me, I would be forever stuck in the "lower class" stigma I had buried myself within.
       I had been graduated from high school with a virtual "D" average and went to junior college on probation.   My high school grades were so poor that even though junior colleges accepted anyone, the poor academic students like myself were required to take "bonehead" classes.  If one were to fail those classes, one would be ejected from junior college.

        I was the only one in my family who had gone to college.   I grew up in a caste system--the military--that defined the serfs from privileged by rank.   There was an invisible line between the officers and enlisted that one did not cross, one carved just as deeply segregation defined bathrooms in the Deep South at the time, illustrated by bathroom signs that read:  "Men,"  "Women," "Colored."  
      In many ways, I felt I was born "beneath the salt," a slave-child to a life destined to stand at the gates of success with a shovel and pick axe over my shoulder, digging the sewers that helped the "successfuls'" bodily wastes tumble downhill so guys like me could haul it away.

     No one shagged a finger in my face and shouted:  "You're a Nobody!"  But the world I lived in seemed to suggest it at every turn.    My breakthrough to college was my violent refusal to accept I had a rock around my neck, dragging me down to the bottom of the primordial ooze from which all humans evolve, only I was the one who was required by the universe to stay buried in the ooze while other genes of my ilk might rise up to the surface, blossom and fly away.
       Despite all my angst I was a nobody, I ground hard to foil the demons of my mind.   I found I had the talents to achieve despite my own lashings with my whip of Self-Degradation and Self-Deprecation.
       So it was more than just a coffee "date" with this young lady on November 22, 1963 that I am reporting.   It was the chance of a "lifetime" to rise up out of the Nobody Well into the sunlight of being Somebody.  If "she" only would go out with me, maybe it would prove I had been successful in creating a mask so well honed that she did not see I was unworthy of her and her social status.
        Little did I know the Beast of Terror was with me that day, plotting and planning as he does to twist fate in such a manner as to change my life forever.

       When she arrived, I dug down into my threadbare pockets for the few quarters necessary to pay for coffee and rolls.    I worked for my college money, and even a thin dime was a treasure.   I was willing to spend it all on caffeine that day in hopes she might offer her hand to pull me out of the slime by agreeing to date me, to endorse me as a "Somebody."    I even thought about her someday introducing me to her English professorial mother, another rung on the ladder of being accepted beyond my station in life.
       I was throat-dry as I steered the conversation toward the date.   I was just about in the middle of asking her out when the radio that usually played music behind the counter began to cackle with frenetic Voices.  The volume rose as the counter clerk tuned it up.   
       I was leaning forward, coughing out my request for a date when the news captured all ears but mine.    The girl sitting across from me stiffened.  Her face turned toward the anonymous Voice on the radio.   She stared at me like a deer caught in the headlights, a common sight in Eugene where the forests were thick with wildlife.
       "We're all going to die!   My God, we're all going to die!"
       Her face went white.   Her eyes glazed over with a deadly emptiness, as though she erased all the pent-up passion I was emitting toward her, as though nothing in the world mattered but her safety, her security.
       "My mother.  I have to find my mother."
       She bolted up from the hard wooden seat, grabbed her books and ran wildly out the door.   I remember shouting after her:  "But what about our date....what about our date..."
        I sank back into the booth, angry, red-faced, sullen.    I had tried to shut out the Voices radiating the pall of death and horror between every molecule in the coffee shop's atmosphere.    I sat clutching my now less-than-hot coffee mug, confused and befuddled how the words coming from the radio could have changed my life, cast me into the seas of Nobodyville with such cruelty, such brutal timing.

       I gave little thought to the fact that President John F. Kennedy had been shot, or that modern Terrorism had reached its hand across the seas of time to splatter the brains of those who believed America was invulnerable to such acts into the laps of all the Complacent, all the Nay-Sayers who held that America had evolved beyond the reach of Terrorism.
        Sure, there was the nuclear threat of Russia and the United States launching great attacks that would annihilate the world, but the odds of that happening had reached such a point that one was sure it would never happen.   But the killing of a president by a sniper, the assassination of one-on-one, well, that was within the realm of everyone's imagination.
        I slumped my shoulders and began the long trek back to my apartment that I shared with two other students, one from Israel and the other from England.   Tony David, Ted Tapper and I had lived together in a crammed, low-ceilinged converted basement apartment.  Ted was doing his masters and Tony was struggling to finish pre-med.   We had met and found common interests.   None of us was very social.  Ted was a socialist, angry at the world for trouncing on the poor disheveled spirits of the world.  He grew up in the lower-class section of England, a member of the caste system as I had, and was constantly railing against injustice.
        Tony David was from Israel, an orthodox Jew who was going to college to be a doctor but really wanted to be a political scientist.  He too had come from a working class background and his goal was to break through the morass.   Tony had fought in the Israeli Army, struggling to help his nation retain its grip in the heart of the middle east.
         In a way, we were all on the same journey--to become Somebodies.
         Along the green, wet grass I traversed to reach our apartment, the fog of the early morning hugged the giant Douglas Firs spearing up some 300 feet into the air.    There was virtually no one around me as I trudged my way through the wet grass, the weight of my thoughts more about how I had failed to garner a date than the assassination of a president, one who had sparked so much hope among the youth of the world that change in our system of government and position himself as a world leader had achieved so much in so little time.

        Kennedy had crushed the old ideas of segregation.   He forced change.  He vowed to send people to the moon.   He challenged the Russians over Cuba and won.
        None of those accomplishments meant much to me at the time.  I was, at the best, apolitical.   I was on a journey to break free of my own slavery, and had little time to think or concern myself about someone else's success.    And, after all, Kennedy represented one of the "haves" while I was a member of the "have-nots."   He was rich and handsome, from the best schools with mountains of money and born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  Why should I bother shedding a tear for him.   If any tears were to fall, they would be for my twisted fate, my loss of any chance for a date with the girl who I believed was my ticket out of nothingness.
         I opened the door to our tiny apartment.   I ducked, as always, to make it through the doorway.   The ceiling almost touched the top of my six-foot four-inch head.    I took a few steps in past the couch and small bedroom into the kitchen.
         The radio was blaring.   Someone was reading a poem by Robert Frost, something about a "sprig of faith," and in the background was patriotic music.   As I entered the kitchen I looked up.   There stood Tony David.
         He was standing at attention, saluting.  Tears poured from his eyes.  The patriotic music consumed the tiny kitchen space.  Tony didn't look at me.  He stared straight ahead, as though he were in full military uniform giving tribute to a great leader.
         Inside, I was reeling from social defeat, from class failure, bleeding from my soul that my one thin chance to rise up out of primordial ooze of class segregation had been thwarted by the assassination of a man I had no relations to or for.
         But then I studied Tony's face.   I froze in that startling moment and realized something I had never before thought about.
         I had my first taste of Patriotism.
         Here was my close friend from another country, not even a U.S. citizen, standing at full attention and saluting a U.S. president with tears streaming down his eyes while I, an American by birth, was more concerned about not getting a date than in the death of a world leader who issued much hope to not only the people in his country, to others in far off lands.
          Shame and guilt drenched me as I stood there, no more than six feet from Tony David.    It was an epiphany of sorts.    In nanoseconds, the value of my life seemed to collide with its worthlessness.   I realized I had no beliefs in my country or the world, but only in my own, selfish desires to eject myself from my crippling lower-class vehicle, the one I had been driving all my life in a maddening journey to escape its boundaries.
         My journey had blinded me to emotions and feelings outside myself, such as the love of country, the respect of nations, the concern for the world.   

      Tony David's tears fell not just to the floor that day, but they found their way to my soul.  They seemed to wash away the scales blinding me to the world, to the passions of life around me.
        I remember feeling the embarrassment of my own selfishness, my own disinterest in things of value and virtue that exist beyond one's self.   
        I put my books on the Formica table with its wobbly legs and stood at attention in front of Tony.  I slowly raised my hand and saluted with him to the sound of the music and to the Voices pealing out from the radio.
        No words needed to be said.
        On that day I realized the need for me to have some sense of Patriotism, some measure of value for others such as my country and the world at large.   
        After that event with Tony David I mulled through my mind the emptiness within me, and the sorrow I felt that I didn't have the passion that Tony had toward things beyond my reach.    Tony David saw America as the Sentinel of Vigilance, a country that stood for something great and powerful in the world, able to step in like a big brother and banish the bullies of the world from tyranny and oppression.
         His tears were for the loss of a "brother," while I had no tears until Tony taught me how to cry for others.
         A few months later, with only a few weeks to go before graduation, I chose to join the U.S. Marine Corps.    My decision was to remove myself from a world where I was trying to find values by escaping my social status, to one of a willingness to die for my country and what it stood for.
         Tony and Ted were upset I enlisted.  They wanted me to finish college.   Everyone did.   But I felt an emptiness within, something that needed to be fed and nourished.  I wanted to believe in something other than the falsity that my station in life, measured by the eyes of others, had been earned.
          College was, for me, a way of hiding from the duty and responsibility of who I was, for I didn't know who I was.  I had no idea.     

        I knew only that Tony David knew who he was.  He knew he was willing to cry for another world leader, to salute a man for what he did, not for how much money he came from or what college degree he had earned.
          Tony David knew a lot about Patriotism--the belief not only in one's country, but in the world at large.   Tony was saluting the Vigilance of  John F. Kennedy to stand up to Terrorism at large.
          I realize that today.   John Kennedy took on the Russians, took on space, took on bigotry and prejudice and ended up with a Terrorist's bullet in his brain.
          Tony was saluting the measure of the man--saluting a Sentinel of Vigilance.
          I was not capable of saluting.
          Now, I am.
          Now, I understand what a Sentinel of Vigilance is.   He or she is a man or woman willing to stand up for what is right for the Children's Children's Children--a person unafraid to buckle to the whims of he world, or be driven by Fear, Intimidation or Complacency into states of inaction or compromise.
          It has taken me nearly forty years to learn this lesson.
          It took September 11, 2001 for me to remember what I had learned over a lifetime--that Vigilance grows out of Patriotism.  That the love of one's country must come before the love of all countries.
          A country is nothing more than a cradle for the children.   To be a true Sentinel of Vigilance I must love my country and all its children, and then extend that love for other countries as the cradle for their children.
         When I learn that lesson, I then seek to bring to the cradle of all countries the same safety and security I enjoy for my children.    

         I believe Tony David saluted President Kennedy that day forty years ago because he saw Kennedy as a TerrorHunter, a man unafraid to face the Beast of Terror and drive him from the cradles of other nations.   He saw Kennedy as the Sentinel of Vigilance, struck down by the Beast of Terror.

         Today, despite lots of politics, I see President Bush as a Sentinel of Vigilance.   I see him standing up to the world fighting for the cradles of nations, for the children who live within those nations to have the same freedoms and opportunities as Americans enjoy.
          On this day,  I salute them both--great Sentinels of Vigilance.
          And, I have learned, it's okay to cry as you do, because the difference between a Nobody and Somebody isn't who you date, it's what you're willing to salute.

Nov. 20-21--Ressurrecting The Bones Of Dissent

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