it was 40 years ago today... [john lennon remembrance]

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who here was alive and aware on december 8, 1980? if you were, what were you doing when you first heard the news of john lennon's assassination? do you think it was just mark david chapman, or do you think he was working for MK-ULTRA? thoughts, any thoughts, please. he's been gone longer than he was alive now, he truly belongs to the ages. i didn't know the man, only saw him from afar, knew he was no angel, but that he was trying to do better. yet there is a hole in my heart still. millions of people die every year, and to the present day each departing human equally was alive and a valid person, each with their strengths and weaknesses, some greater, some lesser. yet John Lennon's premature death that year stands out. there is guilt over this feeling, it messes with my head. at the point of verbal diarrhea now, so please just let me know what you are thinking, even if you are new to the scene and too young to remember it or were born well after it.

Last edited by auntblabby on 08 Dec 2020, 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Elgin, Illinois. I was working as a QA/QC engineer for a manufacturer of slot machines (e.g., "One-Armed Bandits"), when one of the women on the line screamed "They killed him!". She was so upset that we had to send her home.

it was a gray cold damp tuesday, and my day off from work. i slept late, when i got up and switched on the little tv set i had, that was the first thing that popped up on the news bulletin, from the previous night. i was sorta numb, barely comprehending at first, then the awareness gathered and i wondered "why in the hell HIM?!" an empty, desolate feeling, vague sadness, a feeling that it was a honking hole in life that should not have been there. almost a feeling of being robbed of something i hadn't paid enough attention to. more guilt.

It was a very sad day. John Lennon made a lot of people happy. It's still sad to think about it. Today is a grey, dark and damp Tuesday as well. Being a Beatles Fan, my emotions were a little out of wack though I didn't act on them....yet.

just like with buddy holly [his hero], his premature passing echoes to the present day. i can't help but wonder what further things he would have done and what he would have thought about today's world. psychics say that he is busy in the afterlife as some kind of spiritual travelling ambassador. that is a comforting thought.

This is how I felt, as well. I was only 12 but I loved The Beatles from my parents' vinyl record collection. Not only was it sad to lose John Lennon, but it was my first real experience with murder or assassination, and understanding the complexity of mental illness / violence. It was a coming of age experience for me, kind of like the end to my childhood.

a loss of innocence. the suddenness was the nastiest part of it.

My childhood was the Sixties so I was born to be addicted to the Beatles.

But...precisely because I had lived through the Sixties I had already experienced the JFK, RFK, and MLK, assassinations. President Reagan was hit by a would be assassin's bullet about that same 1980 time as Lennon's death, but lived. Though I do remember the moment, I guess I had gotten kinda numb to assassinations by that time. I my case it was shocking how.. UN shocked I was. I guess thats the way to put it.

interesting that assassins tend to be labeled with their first, middle and last names [mark david chapman, john warnock hinkley, lee harvey oswald et al].

John Wilkes Boothe.

Yeah. Never noticed that before.

Back in the day a humorist pointed out that guys who got involved in Watergate tended to go by their first initial plus middle and last name.

E. Howard Hunt. G. Gordon Liddy.

i wonder what it says about those crooks that they like initialing their first name and including their middle? that they are pretentious psychopaths?

could be.

John Lennon died when he was 40,40years ago.

Numbers 32:13

13.The Lord’s anger burned against Israel and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until the whole generation of those who had done evil in his sight was gone.

My father died 3months after John Lennon.
I was 12,4months shy of my 13th.

i will admit that there were other people who i had wished were gone in his place.

Your not alone in that wish.

All the same,

there is method in madness.

It's interesting because before the assassination of Lincoln, Booth was often billed as J. Wilkes Booth when he appeared in stage productions.

I wonder if it was Booth's murder of Lincoln that began the trend of referring to assassins by their full name. Plus, it takes away a little stigma if the first and last name alone are commonplace. I don't think Mark David Chapman put much emphasis on his middle name himself. But think of all the possible Mark Chapmans out there who'd forever be linked to someone with their namesake. Adding the David makes it less ambiguous.

James Ray might have been a somewhat common name, so adding the Earl in their helps clarify things, etc.

If you murdered someone famous tomorrow, we'd all know YOUR full name even if you don't even write your middle initial now.