John Lennon, 28 Years On

Today is the 28th anniversary of the shooting death of John Lennon. Ten years later Rolling Stone ran a story on Lennon’s legacy that included this anecdote.

On October 9th, Lennon’s life was celebrated in a brief ceremony, called Imagine All the People, at the United Nations. After being welcomed to the UN — “this House of Peace” — by Marcella Perez de Cuellar, the wife of UN secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar, Yoko Ono read a prepared statement, played a tape recording of Lennon, in which he urged the world to recognize “the choice we have in front of us: war or peace” and then broadcast the song “Imagine” over more than 1000 radio stations in 130 countries to an audience of approximately a billion listeners.

Several hundred UN diplomats and delegates, journalists, friends of John and Yoko’s and other guests gathered in an auditorium at the UN for the ceremony. “The dream we dream alone is only a dream,” Yoko said during her introduction, invoking the more mystical aspect of her and Lennon’s shared sensibility. “But the dream we dream together is reality.”

Here you go