Agree or Disagree? THE ominous omen

I write these lines on 22 November, a date which, unless you are an American citizen, will mean little. For Americans, however, nationals of the Big Bad Banana Republic, “Greatest Country in the World” as they are reminded incessantly from childhood, it is one of those dates that resonates ominously in memory – particularly if you are old enough to remember precisely where you were and what you were doing when the word came down. “The President has been shot.”

Not just “shot” either but his brains blasted all over his fancy Lincoln Continental (the brand of the Presidential limousine just one of many ironies, for President Lincoln himself was also shot in the back of the head by an assassin), live and filmed from many angles. The United States of America lost its innocence that day, and in the years that followed, as cover-ups and conspiracy conjecture whirled around and around.

Consider this bit of history, dear YaUdah Bistro patron: “The conversations date back to 1964 when Jacqueline Kennedy had in-depth conversations with historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jnr.
“Kennedy said to Jacqueline, after his successful resolution of the extremely dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis ‘If anyone’s going to kill me, it should happen now.’

Then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson invited Kennedy to travel to Texas for a campaign tour. Kennedy, a liberal, was widely hated in that strongly conservative part of the country and a number of his friends advised JFK not to go to Dallas. During the president’s birthday party on Nov. 20, his sister Ethel Kennedy ‘…found Jack distant and brooding…’ and he later sang a ‘haunting’ song to a group of friends.

The previous weekend, “Jack had made an unusual spontaneous trip to Palm Beach to say goodbye to his father,” adds the author on a book about the Kennedys.

PREMONITION OR COINCIDENCE?

Did the President have an omen he would not see another sunrise? On the morning of JFK’s death, the President spoke to his wife, who was uneasy about their safety in Dallas, where even the press made it clear he was not welcome. Kennedy told her bluntly “But Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it. So why worry about it?”

Coincidence? Or Premonition? It’s a hot topic, and everybody has an opinion about it. Westerners pride themselves on being practical, hard-headed, evidence-bound (except when it comes to religion!) They tend to reject the spooky world of the supernatural or the paranormal – even when it affects them personally.

LION AIR CRASH VICTIM’S MOTHER: ‘AN OMEN’

A lot can happen that cannot be easily explained away. ‘The grieving mother of a flight attendant aboard Lion Air flight JT610 that crashed into the Java Sea on Monday morning claimed to have seen an “omen” of the deadly accident.

‘On Saturday afternoon, two days before the accident, Sukartini found that a zebra dove had fallen into a water tank located on the second floor of her house. She saved the bird and put it in a cage, never thinking that this, she said, could be an omen for her only daughter Alfiani Hidayat Solikah.

“The bird is still alive,” Sukartini said, as quoted by kompas.com.’

Most likely Madame Sukartini would never have connected her saving the life of the bird from the water with the crash that took her daughter’s life, if she had not been seeking some logical or rational explanation. Do omens make sense?

For this writer, a retired professional motorcycle road racer, the answer is a definite yes. Twice in recent years I had a strong feeling I should avoid riding – once on a sports bike, and once on a mountain bike – and both times I ignored the feeling. Later that day I ran into the back of a slow-moving car – totally my own fault – which was the first collision I had ever had in fifty years of bike riding.

In the other case there were two routes I could have taken to get home on my bicycle. I had a strong feeling I should take one and avoid the other, which I ignored. I took the downhill route – one I’d ridden my bike down without incident hundreds of times previously – and nearly hit a child dashing across the road just in front of me. You can be sure I thought back to my premonition.

You can have premonitions about people (but of course that could be explained away by physical appearance and body language), death and dying (which are not necessarily about your own death) – but of course if the premonition does not manifest then you would discount it. The subject has even become so fashionable that they’ve made a teeny-bopper movie about it.

Even animals are said to have premonitions of earthquakes (although scientists anxious to disprove such nonsense argue that perhaps there are electromagnetic, ionizing, air pressure or other disturbances that trigger an anxiety response in the animal).

Thus there seems to be a degree of acceptance, however reluctant, of a sense or feeling of something unusual about to happen – something that just about everyone can remember (even if they brush it off). It does not have to be paranormal – simply something that can be explained rationally. On the other hand the hard-headed Chinese have been exploring this realm of ESP for some time.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK

DEAR Ya Udah Bistro PATRON?

Share your premonitions, recall your omens, in the Comments Section below. We’ll run your comments, with or without your name, and we’ll run them here below.