Echoes of Another Day. . .The blog Dreaming up Daily has a series of recent posts and photographs about Robert F. Kennedy that I want to recommend. His 11/20 essay begins with "This would have been Robert F. Kennedy's 80th birthday." One of Kennedy's great speeches is included. It also has a number of haunting photos of Kennedy. The essay was cross posted in this blogger's Daily Kos diary Captain Future. It was good enough to be listed as a featured diary, and is getting a large number of heart felt comments. Check it out. And here is a site inspired by Kennedy called Ripple of Hope.
Now, it is hard to believe this young and vital man would be an elder statesman. Many of us remember the disbelief surrounding his assassination, the blur of shock, dashed hopes and loss. Even now it is difficult for me to write about it. RFK's violent untimely death was the third, after President John Kennedy and The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The year 1968 was all too much, too dark, too sad, too scary.
They Marched Into Sunlight, by Davis Maraniss, is one of my favorite books because the author chronicles that year with such brilliance. My own chronicle of that year is much more personal, less global. Our four kids ranged in age from 7 to 12. I was a stay-at-home mom then, in the PTA and at the ironing board. Watching those bloody days march across the TV screen in front of me, I was not in circumstances nor the right generation to protest for peace. But my heart was there, and my eyes full of tears.
Soon it will be forty years since then. I still feel passionately that we should not be at war. The width of the disagreements that separate neighbor from neighbor, party from party is still troubling to me.
What has changed in the 21st century is the availability of outstanding leaders. Where today are the men and women who can inspire the kind of admiration those three men inspired in us back then? We, like the Marines, "need a few good men"--and women to run for public office.
politics
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