The Healing

Two months before I was born, the Tet Offensive began - shredding the last desperate hope we would salvage anything from a broken war. Two days after I was born, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. Two months after I was born, we lost Robert F. Kennedy.

Can a life be defined by the year of its birth? No. But there it remains. A year which has haunted a nation - becoming ingrained in our very conscience. A wound on an entire generation so deep the healing always seemed far from possible.

Those born in the chaos of 1968 never knew the hope of previous years. We were weaned on Watergate, reached adulthood chased by the spectre of nuclear destruction and entered the prime of our life with the shadow of another broken war covering our future.

For four decades we, along with our beloved country, yearned for a cleansing - water to wash away the sins and sorrow of the past. We wanted nothing less than to be dipped into the river of hope and emerge back into the sunlight of a new life. A life reborn.

A life healed.