EDITOR�S NOTE

I was born in the same year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated. Both men carried with them the hopes of so many Americans that their deaths, just two months apart, rocked the country.

It was a pretty bad year all around. Warsaw Pact troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Vietnam War was in full swing � that year featuring the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre and a growing anti-war movement that was dividing the US.

And those are just a few of the highlights of a year full of bad news. Add to that France exploding it�s first hydrogen bomb and the fact that the soap opera One Life to Live premiered on TV, and it�s easy to understand why my mom still calls it �a scary time to have a baby.� Watching Rosemary�s Baby while she was pregnant with me probably didn�t help her mental well-being much, either.

Since that fateful year so long ago, the horrifying cavalcade of invasions, massacres, explosions and bad television has continued � and it kind of looks like it will for some time to come.

What got me thinking about all of this was the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. While I don�t feel well enough informed to have any real opinion about her, I do know that there were many people in her country and the world who held her in high regard and saw her as the best hope for some kind of peace and stability in Pakistan. Unfortunately, there were also people who felt the opposite.

When the times that we live in make it hard for me to keep my chin up, I try to remember that there�s still a lot of good stuff, too. After all, even though the year that I was born was �a scary time to have a baby,� at least one good thing came out of it � me. And I, at least, am happy to have me around.

Sean Vale
Editor
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