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Where were you when John Lennon was shot?

On December 8, people around the world will take time out again to remember the anniversary of the death of John Lennon.

"Where were you when John Lennon was shot" became just as poignant a question as the one posed by another generation when people asked, "Where were you when JFK was assassinated?" 17 years earlier.

For myself, I was a student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois when I heard the news that fateful night in December, 1980. I had been studying for finals in my dorm room and didn't think much of the block of Beatles' songs being played by the local college radio station I had tuned in. Only when I walked upstairs to the TV room to check the score on the Monday Night Football game when I learned of the news. Howard Cosell broke away from his usual play-by-play of the game to announce to the millions of viewers that Lennon had been shot.

I ran back downstairs and burst into my friend Paul Collin's room to tell him the news.

"Now I know the world is coming to an end," Paul said as he sunk down in the beanbag chair he had been sitting on, "someone shot a Beatle."

We tuned in the college radio station and listened to one Beatle song after another, too stunned to say anything.

And it did seem like the world had, at least for the moment, stopped. For the next few days, it seemed that the whole world was in mourning. It didn't make any difference where you were, there was bound to be someone who had either grown up with the Beatles or who had been touched by Lennon's music.

Even if you hadn't been into his music or a fan of the Beatles, the fact that an entertainer, a musician, a person who tried to advocate peace through his music had been gunned down was tragic enough to make one stop and take stock of their own life.

What was it that brought so many different people together, then when they gathered at Lennon's Dakota apartment or other places to leave messages, flowers, album covers, candles and the like in memorial and now, when people again gather around the world to remember? What was it about Lennon's life and his subsequent death that affected so many people around the world? Why did his death in 1980 fill so many people with such an incomprehensible sense of loss?

Without question, Lennon's death was the loss of an icon for a generation.

We always feel robbed and cheated when one of our icons, one of our generation's spokespersons is taken away from us. Although one can argue that it's unbefitting

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