“My home town, your home town”

Richard Bloom

Special To The Mirror

   Thank you to the Mirror for giving me the opportunity to write a column about our great city. I’ll try to bring you my perspective on matters both large and small.
  Though this column is to be about Santa Monica, today my thoughts are three thousand miles away in Martha's Vinyard. The startling, depressing events of last weekend lay heavily on everyone's minds.
  I was not alone in recalling President Kennedy's death when the tragic news arrived that his son, his daughter in law and her sister had been lost in a plane crash. Of course, it was hardly possible to avoid the thought, what with televisions and radios blaring the inevitable discussion of the long history of Kennedy suffering.
   My baby boom contemporaries have long been fond of recalling where we were on the day John Kennedy was murdered, thirty-six years ago in Dallas. (I was a ten year old grade schooler in Pasadena. My teacher turned on a classroom television and began to weep.)
   Without a doubt, President Kennedy’s death was a turning point for millions of Americans. It was a turning point that led many of us, eventually, to question the most fundamental of our beliefs. We became a generation committed to fighting poverty, racism and injustice.
   In many ways, John Kennedy, Jr. was part of that legacy, representing perhaps the best of his father's ideals: the "ask what you can do for your country" Kennedy.
   John, Jr. was, by all accounts, philanthropic, friendly and neighborly. A compassionate man born into a family with both fortune and fame, he could have done anything, or nothing with his life. He chose to enter the difficult, frequently cutthroat world of magazine publishing. George is a magazine that takes a refreshing look our world. Run by an unabashed liberal, George has always been seen, even by conservatives, as an exceedingly fair journal.
   What does this all have to do with Santa Monica? Simply put, we would be a much different city, were it not for President Kennedy.     The idealists of the sixties—childhood witnesses to the televised assassination of our country’s leader - are the same people who, two decades ago, gathered together in Santa Monica and decided that this was a place that should give greater voice to residents, one that placed housing and environmentalism at the top of its agenda. In a town driven for decades by pro-development policies, suddenly there were other issues to confront.
   Today, when you ask people why they enjoy living here, one of the most frequent response is "because of the politics". We are a town that marches to a different drummer and the first beats were heard from behind the caisson that carried President Kennedy's body to Arlington National Cemetery.
   And then there was John, Jr. Maybe it didn’t hit home until he died, but we had a common bond with John, Jr. inexorably linking us with his father and this, I think, is one of the reasons we have taken his death so personally. Looking at it now it is easy to understand. We could respect and identify with John, Jr. You knew that he cared about the poor just as we do. Cared about his neighborhood and his family, as we do. Cared about the environment, as we do.
   If Santa Monica is one of the great municipal beacons of progressivism in our country, then too, John Kennedy, Jr. was a good part of the energy from which that light was generated.
Younger generations of Santa Monicans may not quite understand what all the fuss is about. But those of us who became known as the baby boomers know and we will miss John Jr., even as we continue to support those causes for which we both stood.
We will miss you, JFK.

Richard Bloom is a member of the Santa Monica City Council and family law attorney.