50 years ago today. I know where I was. I was in 5th grade. Home sick with a cold. My father called, he was crying, saying the president has been shot. Turn on the TV, tell your mother. (Dawns on me I called my sister and my parents, crying, on 9/11).

It was just the start of what would be a hard decade, where people decided the way to change life was to kill people. John, Malcolm, Martin, Robert. (Oh, heaven, I think of how impossible it was to lose my sister’s kids five years apart. One to suicide, one drunk driving. Impossible to fathom. Impossible to believe. What must it have been like for the Kennedys with two boys shot within five years.

What must it be like for people in the ghettos and the trenches with all their children dying whether one by one in drive by shootings and gang violence or in a group in a bomb in some war-torn place in our world. How do parents stay sane? How do they keep going… but of course few people really do die of a broken heart.

How can we believe that violence is the answer? I didn’t understand then. I don’t understand much better now. “There is no way to Peace, Peace is the way.” Let there be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me.” Peace. May I be Peace. May you. May we together be Peace.