I remember being just puzzled as I watched the monk set himself on fire. Seeing the picture of the naked girl running screaming down the road upset me, but I still did not understand the circumstances.
The Tate-LaBianca murders were also well within my ability to remember, considering my age and coverage in the news. Yet I didn't remember a single thing about them and I often wondered why - until I saw the movie Helter Skelter in my twenties. The scene with the old woman in the rabbit hutch hit me like a revelatory epiphany. At the time, my family had a pet rabbit that we kept in the backyard and a slim, sweet grandmother that I saw often and loved dearly. I remembered seeing the news and I was horrified that somebody could treat their grandmother like that.
So, I agree with the tweet. Times and people were not innocent when I was a child - I was. And I had limited ability to understand what was going on. Perhaps today's ten-year-olds will look back on events of today and wonder how we got through it, much the same way I wonder how my parents got through the 1960s.
But I know how they did it. The same way that we will do it. It's because we have to.
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