A New Year, The Same Fear

So we shall start to say goodbye, 1950s. It's a new decade after all, yet Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver are still on TV. Will that time ever let go?
There was heavy snow in 1961. It fell hard on Washington D.C. the night before John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president, and there was talk of canceling his inauguration due to the weather. I would miss the importance of that speech, I was nine years old and too concerned with what I got for Christmas, and whether or not we'd get another snow day off from school. If only I had been a little older, then maybe I would have listened; maybe I would have learned.
President Eisenhower gave a speech, too. Before Senator Kennedy became our next President, Eisenhower talked to America, and he had a warning. He spoke of the dangers of a vast military-industrial complex taking control of the country. It would mean little to me and my classmates as we threw snowballs in the playground after school; just something the grown-ups needed to worry about.
We prayed the Lord's Prayer in school every day, without regard to the freedoms we pledged to, but there were rumblings about that. There were people beginning to complain that prayer in schools was unconstitutional, that freedom of religion also meant freedom from religion as well, and the battle lines were being drawn.
Black and white students would hop on buses and go down south to test the law, to see if integration would be tolerated, and there would be violence. I didn't, I couldn't understand any of it, and I would be uncomfortable about my feelings, and I'd remember my friend LuLu from years before.
A battle would be fought in a bay of pigs. Somewhere off in Cuba, we'd hear, and it was bungled. It was a secret mission, launched by our country by a reluctant president, and it did nothing more than send us all closer to nuclear war with the Russians. So we hid beneath our desks and covered our heads with our hands, and again we wondered if the end was coming for us all.
In a little country somewhere over there in Asia, trouble was brewing. It was a place we never heard of, but American soldiers and helicopters would be sent there, and we wondered what it was all about, how such a tiny place with jungles and rivers should concern us.
Yet, out of all this trouble, an idea was given form, and our country would give birth to a new cause; the cause of peace. President Kennedy created a new organization, The Peace Corps, he called it, and Americans would be called upon to help the sick, the poor and the disadvantaged of the world, without regard to political ideals. Hope instead of misery, pride instead of fear.
We would also look to the sky in this year of 1961.
The people of the world would look upon the heavens, and for the first time ever, men would be looking back, sitting among the stars.