December 8, 2022

Disasters and Angels

Fifty years ago today John Lennon sat down to watch the evening news and saw that a plane had crashed into a neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side, killing 45 people including two on the ground.

One of those killed was Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt. She had $10,000 cash on her.

John Lennon watched the flames on TV, saw the wreckage, and recalled the Beatles playing at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1965 and wondered how it all tied in together: Watergate, the White Sox, Rock ‘n Roll, Chicago, and death from above.

Lennon watched his TV and thought about it all and hummed a Christmas tune. Perhaps it was “War is Over,” which he had released one year before.

John Lennon said a prayer for those killed in Chicago and wondered what his life would have been like if he’d settled there instead of New York.

Eight years later, on December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot and killed in New York, outside the building where he lived.

The lost music, the quiet Christmases, the relentless gun violence of America that now kills more than 40,000 people every year. When Lennon was killed school shootings were unheard of. Now we wonder when the next one is coming.

Maybe John Lennon wished he had never left England, where they have fewer than 200 gun deaths every year.

He chose America’s vastness, its promise, its wealth, its wonder, its freedom, its joy…but he was not safe here.

No one is.

All we want for Christmas is to see the next Christmas. For everyone to see the next Christmas.  --TK