In 1991, my best friend Bob and I saw Oliver Stone’s JFK and suddenly, we two Minnesota teenagers understood the TRUTH about that dark day in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was just a patsy, the straw man thrown to the fire by a Cuban-Texan-District-of-Columbian conspiracy that stood to make untold billions from the Vietnam War that Kennedy was planning to end. There were shooters on the Grassy Knoll, accomplices at the hospital, and rich men having orgies with gold-painted male prostitutes. Our parents had been fooled. Fooled!

Of course, if the world wasn’t ready for Oliver Stone’s truth about the 35th president of the United States, it certainly wasn’t ready for the president and vice-president of the St. Agnes High School Student Council to blow a hole in American history. Accordingly, we waited, and while we waited, we continued our research. Bob read the Warren Commission Report (pure fiction that it was), and I put the lion’s share of a Barnes & Noble gift certificate towards a thick mass-market paperback that had already had its spine broken to a gory black-and-white photograph of President Kennedy’s cratered skull. (“Ewww!” said the sophomore girls I should have been hitting on.) We took the bus to downtown St. Paul to see assassination witness Jean Hill speak at the library. She just didn’t believe the official story, she said, and we loudly applauded her courage.

Somehow, though, two decades later, I found myself listening to my brother’s theories about the truth behind what happened on 9/11—and reacting with incredulity. There was something about an extra building, and something about airplane schedules, and I just couldn’t bother with the details of what one of my closest family members was saying about a potentially vast conspiracy to obscure the truth. How had I become such a pawn of the corrupt establishment?

One answer is simple laziness. It’s exhausting to be a conspiracy theorist, since if the conspiracy was that obvious, it wouldn’t work. Being a devoted conspiracy theorist means mastering volumes and volumes of excruciatingly detailed information about areas of knowledge—ballistics, Dallas geography, Governor John Connally’s underwear—that aren’t particularly compelling unless their understanding is key to unlocking the deepest secrets of the American Illuminati. Bob kept at it longer than I did, which wasn’t even long enough to bother seeing the Jack Ruby movie.

Another answer, though, is that the more I learned about how the institutions of the adult world operate, the harder it became to believe that the world’s largest bureaucracies are subject to the manipulations of a secret cadre. That’s not to say that bureaucracies aren’t fucked up, it’s just to say that they aren’t fucked up in a carefully choreographed manner.

The world certainly isn’t fair, and justice often isn’t served. Compared to the teenage me, though, I’m less prone to attribute that unfairness to the deliberate machinations of a conspiracy than to pure and simple human fallibility. It’s inconvenient for me to study up on the details of 9/11 and 11/22, but, it now seems to me, our failure to delve into those dirty details is responsible for far less human unhappiness than our failure to bother donating to charity, or to go to neighborhoods we’re ignorant of, or to learn new languages, or even to vote.

The turnout in this month’s elections, across America, ranged from poor to pathetic. If two-thirds of people who have the right to vote fail to exercise that right, how much effort is it worth to dig into the powers that supposedly lie behind the throne? The first challenge would seem to be getting people to care about who’s even on the throne.

Of course, the conspiracy theorist I used to be would say that people’s failure to vote—and to stand up for the right to vote, without gerrymandering or vote suppression—is the symptom of a society where we no longer believe that our vote matters, a society where we understand that the strings of power don’t run through the polls. Apparently a majority of Americans still believe we don’t know the whole truth behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination, so maybe there’s something to that idea.

In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik argues that JFK conspiracy theories continue to compel because, whether or not any given theory is correct, the search for the truth uncovers many unsettling facts about the people we trust to run our country. The military-industrial complex probably didn’t kill Kennedy, but there obviously is a military-industrial complex. The Warren Report isn’t actually pure fiction, but it’s a lot sloppier than you’d like a major federal investigation into the death of a president to be. Jim Garrison probably wasn’t right that Clay Shaw was part of a vast conspiracy to kill the president, but he was right that the CIA was up to some extremely shady business that it wasn’t pleased to have a district attorney poking into. The story America was told about Kennedy’s assassination and the events surrounding it was, at best, much too tidy.

At the climax of Stone’s JFK, Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison looks directly into the camera and says, “It’s up to you.” That moment got me in 1991, and it still gets me now—because he’s right. It is up to us to hold our government accountable—and to hold ourselves accountable.

Conspiracy buffs allege that wealthy corporations helped inspire Kennedy’s assassination because they stood to benefit from the Vietnam War (though the assertion that Kennedy was about to bring the war to a speedy conclusion is as questionable as anything else the conspiracy theorists aver). Whether or not they’re right about that, they’re not wrong that wars are about a lot more than freedom and ideals. Yet, even with the specious origins of the Iraq War—and Halliburton’s profits as part of a privatized military—right out there in the open, America still re-elected George W. Bush over a decorated veteran who’d been one of the brave and insightful early critics of the Vietnam War. Bush didn’t need to call any chad-related favors in circa 2004, he just won the election outright. Who could be sued for that crime? Your Honor, I call human nature to the stand.

In the closing credits of JFK, Stone ostentatiously dedicated the film TO THE YOUNG, IN WHOSE SPIRIT THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH MARCHES ON. Watching JFK now, I’m struck by how much of the movie must have gone completely over my fervent teenage head. (It definitely took me 20 more years to learn what poppers are.) Still, I can recognize what I responded to, and what that has to do with my current career as a journalist. JFK is one of the great cinematic depictions of the journalistic ethos: if you totally nerd out and make the connections among facts both known and unknown, you can reveal hugely important truths that can make the world a better place—when you get it right, and when people manage to pay attention to them and act in a reasonable manner.

Following that career path takes the kind of idealism that Costner’s Garrison represents, the kind of idealism it gets harder and harder to have as you live through the years and see more and more evidence that people—yourself included—often kind of suck. We’re all lazy and confused and we never know as much as we could or should. That’s not a conspiracy waiting to be outed, it’s just the way we are…but we can be better, when we’re inspired to try.

Whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was truly the lone assassin responsible for JFK’s death, the 50th anniversary of the president’s assassination might serve as a reminder that many of us could stand to reconnect with our passionate teenage selves. We might not have been right, but we cared about what right was.

– Jay Gabler