We remember, my compatriots, we who are old enough to remember, each of us, our exact location on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot dead and time stopped.

We remember, and for a long time afterwards we would share our stories. When did we stop?

I was attending a philosophy seminar that brilliant, cool morning when the loudspeaker crackled on, a senior at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and newly pregnant with my first child. (Oh Sean! What a time you chose to be born!)

Immediately, we all filed out, headed as one student body, one open bleeding heart and without thinking, to the nearby Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, to pray.

When confronted with the impossible, we invoke the miraculous.

Prayer is still an appropriate response, I’d say, especially when it directly invokes the divine. Intermediaries, it turns out, have feet of clay. We have lost our innocence. We now know just how deeply corrupted by sin and scandal are the fictional institutional layers of the Catholic “religion.”

Yes. Remember the feeling of dread and horror that shuddered through you on that awful, awe-filled day; recall how that shuddering kept reverberating — through the assassinations of other heroes — Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and untold, unsung others. All the dead, in all the wars.

Notice how that feeling of dread and horror eventually became too much to bear. How you shut down, and turned inwards, to your own survival, separate from the great swelling oceanic tide of humanity that breathes through you.

You bought into the programming: pretended you were on your own, a “free individual,” transmogrified from “citizen” to “consumer” — in order to “get ahead,” by stepping on others, flattening them, if necessary, in a mad mad race to buy more stuff to show off — and eventually, throw away — where it joined mountains of other “garbage,” to foul our magnificent nest.

As if that, getting more and more, and that, getting rid of more and more, was where real value lay!

Meanwhile, though we started out innocent, those who would rule us did not. World Wars I and II, we now find out, were financed, both sides, by what we now call “banksters,” for, of course, “profit.” In a world where money is the “bottom line,” authentically human values bleed out.

So, after the very public assassinations, and their phony investigations began, of course war after war after war continued, all of them reflections/projections of our personal wars at home, those within, between and among us that split persona from soul, mothers from fathers, children from parents, men from women, neighbors from neighbors, classes, and races, small towns from cities, people from nature, Earth from her starry home.

Nearly 40 years went by. Then, the final decimation. Whatever parts of ourselves ravenous corporations had not yet privatized, whatever sanity we still possessed as a people, was ripped asunder by 9/11, that very public, in-your-face ritual sacrifice of thousands to fuel fear and terror and put the final cap on cognitive dissonance. That ritual shown over and over again ad nauseum on corporate media, drilled into our already stupefied brains, our already closed hearts; that satanic ritual, the “explanation” of which, those who profit from our ignorance and confusion and, yes, enslaved minds and hearts, mockingly showed us was actually utterly impossible, given the evidence! And we bought the official story, most of us. Like fish in the sea, we flocked to that hook and skewered ourselves.

What evidence? Who cares? By this time we were so dumbed down, so much the sheeple wallowing in our own junked up, splashy, caffeinated, pharmaceuticated, materialized jingoism, that we had to positively ignore the reality of what was staring us in the face. Why? Because to pay attention, to wake up, would be to die to our superficial brainwashed personas and be born again into our original, unique, brilliant, self-expressive natures.

That’s too scary.

So we denied it. And went on. Numb, frozen, “hopeful” that things would get better, that Barack Obama and ETs and, now, “The Event” of “mass arrests” would save us.

But they can’t. We’re beginning to know that. We’re beginning to know that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and that it’s time. That we must wake up to what has been done to us and to others in our name. That we must wake up and act.

And to wake up is first of all to to remember, to re-member.

Let us re-member, let us ask our own and each others’ forgiveness for all that we chose not to see or feel for so long. Let us put ourselves back together again, each of us a lover, whole and holy; all of us as one loving species, dwelling upon this gracious beautiful living intelligent planetary being, eyes and ears and intuition attuned to the cosmos, at one with the vastness. Yes, let us begin again in gratitude and wonder.

And to do so, let us return to who we were before all that gradually stopped us from feeling our humanity took place.

Read, watch this. Thanks to riseearth.com. For though Kennedy was, it turns out, as flamboyantly flawed as any “hero,” he was also, at least up until this day, July 2, 2012, the last truly courageous U.S. president.

May we follow Kennedy’s lead, and speak truth to fake “power.” They (the cabal) are few and we are many. There is no way they can “assassinate” us all.

The President Who Told the Truth