We’re all starving beggars in need of the same bread

PDF Version

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, September 27, 2025)

Not to bum you out, but before in a minute we flip the calendar back to John F. Kennedy, let’s recognize September as a month of particular sadness.

The deaths of public figures like Ken Dryden and Robert Redford and certainly Charlie Kirk remind us of our mortality, how in a flash everything can change. We’re human. And vulnerable.

Stories often remind us. Sometimes it seems like we’re living in them.

One is the Tobias Wolff short story, “Bullet in the Brain.” A former student once wrote me to confess that he feared he was becoming like this fictitious story’s key character, Anders. He’s a cynical book critic who’s shot in the head during a bank heist. Anders is so miserable and arrogant that during the robbery he’s hopelessly blind to how his sneering ways put him in danger.

He wasn’t always like this. A young Anders loved language and believed in just causes and had a measure of grace and mercy as he saw our broken world. But along the way he somehow died, this before any bullet entered his head. He died, like some do, to any sense of what’s important or real, things like other people or joy or even honest outrage, anything true and authentic, really.

I recently read another story, this one not fiction. A woman, after hearing a convicting speaker, heard her inner voice telling her to get outside. She argued. To leave she’d have to climb over several people, including her husband. But she did, then went outside and up a hill where, near a chapel, that voice said to have a funeral, to bury her old self, especially her crippling pride.

Like an anti-Anders, this real-life woman did this. She had a ceremony of sorts as if her old self was a grain of wheat put in the ground to die and grow into something new. This, after all, is the war we each fight, the struggle we each have, to become more human, to see our common need, how we’re all starving beggars in need of the same bread.

This is what I told my worried student. No, you won’t become like Anders. Not you. Why not? Because you see your own weakness. You have understanding and self-awareness. Now you can do something about it.

This leads us to John F. Kennedy. Sixty-one years ago today, Sept 27, 1964, the Warren Commission released its report saying, based on evidence, the bullets shot into Kennedy on the day of his 1963 assassination came only from the motive and gun of Lee Harvey Oswald.

No conspiracy.

This led to the never-ending stream of books and movies and commentaries saying otherwise. Kennedy’s assassination is a mother of conspiracy theories. Less debated is the intrigue and sadness felt for a long time. There I am, a young teenager 15 years later in front of the television watching one Kennedy feature or another with my father.

The Zapruder film, an 8mm home recording that, by chance, captured the full assassination, was central to analysis. Now, for Charlie Kirk, our phones record the bloody horror. And while Charlie was various things, he was neither angel nor devil as much as another needy human, now on the long list of American assassinations, lionized on one hand, demonized on the other, and dehumanized in the process.

On my bookshelf is a Kennedy biography, “A Life Unfinished.” And isn’t this the crux of these matters? Most people die somewhat naturally. You and me (I’m guessing) and the white-haired woman in the obits, and the pale, thin man in Apartment 5, and many others. But we all might feel a measure of this, how, with so much unfinished, surely life can’t be over.

In this, then, it seems that no death is natural. Not really. Maybe we’ll learn more about it while living in the peace of the long tomorrow.