c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) “Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me where he’s gone? He freed a lot of people but it seems the good die young. I just looked around and he’s gone.”

_ From the song “Abraham, Martin and John,” by Dion (1968)

For baby boomers, this year marks a sad observance: the 35th anniversary of the death of innocence. With the assassinations, in 1968, of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy, D-N.Y., young Americans who began the decade inspired by John F. Kennedy’s vision of a New Frontier now began to despair openly about the future. The deaths of King and Kennedy, together with the election in November of Richard Nixon as president and the ongoing war in Vietnam, forever changed the way many Americans viewed the world.

At the heart of this change in worldview was an increasing lack of trust in the nation’s leaders and institutions. As the nation’s deep divisions _ including racial unrest, opposition to the war, civil disobedience and rioting _ were being aired nightly on network news programs, young people who had been reared on the values of the nation’s so-called Judeo-Christian ethic began to seriously question both the values and the institutions that promoted them.

This revolution in values was accelerated by a concomitant revolution in technology. The same nation that at the dawn of the 1950s was getting its information primarily from radio and newspapers was, by the end of the decade, becoming increasingly transfixed by the immediacy and visual power of television.

Thus, for example, when Birmingham (Ala.) Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered water from fire hoses to be sprayed on black children during the Birmingham civil rights campaign in 1963, the nation could no longer avert its attention from the oppression being broadcast nightly into its collective living room.

Similarly, President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War took on an entirely new meaning as, for the first time in history, families watched their loved ones die on national television.

Faced with what they felt was the hypocrisy of the establishment, baby boomers began to embrace heroes who they believed spoke for them. In the minds of many, King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Kennedy, a senator from New York and the latest scion of the Kennedy clan to run for president, had the authority _ moral and otherwise _ not only to speak truth to power, but to effect substantive change in American policy, both foreign and domestic.

Alas, both King and Kennedy were martyred within two months of each other in 1968. The subsequent election of Nixon sounded a death knell to baby boomer visions of “the beloved community” _ visions that would not be rekindled until the election of Bill Clinton nearly a quarter-century later.

Yet, for all of Clinton’s brilliance and promise, his “Slick Willie” persona continually put a damper on our hopes. It was as if we lowered our expectations even as we continued to support him.

Today, the baby boom generation is middle-aged, with the oldest of us headed inevitably toward geezerdom. We have a president many don’t like and are engaged in a war that recalls the fears of our youth.

Is it any wonder that 35 years after the deaths of our heroes, many still shake their heads and wonder where it all went wrong?

DEA END ATCHISON