Remembering Bobby
Posted on May 29, 2008 by Michael Paskel |
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
Until, in our own despair,
Against our will,
Comes wisdom
Through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus
This was Robert Kennedy’s favorite poem, written by his favorite poet. He quoted it to a crowd of shocked and horrified onlookers at a rally in Indianapolis the night Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. The anger of the crowed he faced was of such magnitude that a lesser man would surely have gone armed with more than mere poetry and may have simply chosen not to address them at all. Still this simple poem connected with the crowd as a means of identifying a shared sacrifice, a burden too heavy to be borne alone. In him they saw a man who had known great loss in his life and while much of America convulsed in anger and violence following Kings assassination, the city of Indianapolis simply went home and wept.
Bobby Kennedy was as common as he was unique; his brief but extraordinary life focused the attention of his contemporaries on poverty, violence and deprivation in ways that seem almost impossible to describe to those who were not there to witness his life and times.
For anyone born after 1968 to look at his picture in books and magazines or on grainy video, is to get some fleeting measure of what they missed of his luminous bearing. For those of us who lived in the turbulence of his time and who were moved by his wake, it is a heart-stopping reminder of exactly what we’ve lost.
The power of his words, while considerable, was in some measure less compelling than the pained look in his eyes. Those eyes seemed pools of anguish as bottomless as the despair he tried to ease.
There was Vietnam and the tens of thousands who died serving their country honorably; and those politicians who preferred sacrificing more young lives than to risk sacrificing their reputations by honestly defending their own flawed judgments.
There were minorities who’s rights were subjugated to the passionate prejudices of those who could not feel good about themselves without diminishing another human being, whose bigotry and hate robbed blacks not only of their civil rights and human dignity but sometimes, of their very lives.
There were the hungry children of Appalachia whose lives were as empty as their stomachs; whose next meal was as uncertain as their future and whose existence to those most prosperous in the richest country in the world, was an inconvenience too desperate to acknowledge or contemplate.
There were the elderly who lived day to day by the most paltry of means, who had subsisted on little more than hope during the great depression but who somehow held their families together and raised their kids. They met and ultimately vanquished, the bloody wave of Fascism that threatened to plunge human freedom itself into everlasting darkness. Those, who would one day be called “The Greatest Generation”, were shelved and forgotten by the very ones for whom they had sacrificed in order to nurture and protect in hope of securing for them, a better life than the one they had endured. These were an unrepresented constituency.
All around there was pain too great to ease and injustice too awful to ignore starring back at a nation that seemed too distracted or just too indifferent to care, so it simply looked away.
Bobby stared them all down.
He asked how many more of our enemies we’d have to kill before they would learn to love us. He asked how many more malnourished children we were willing to watch starve in order to pursue unimpeded, our own greed and avarice. He asked how many more lynchings we were willing to abide, how many more churches we were willing to see burned, how many more lives we were willing to sacrifice before we were ready to seek solutions to the causes of these immoral stains on the fabric of our nation’s conscience; not in the laws of the country, but inside the hearts of each of his countrymen.
Robert Kennedy was a flawed man; an imperfect servant wrestling with his own personal demons. He could be ruthless, obscene, thoughtless at times and reckless in his behavior. All of this is true and cannot be ignored. But the world took his spirit and his energy in directions that made us better for his having passed by. In the end he only diminished himself by his shortcomings.
So 40 springs ago we listened to him and held each word in our hearts. By the summer of 1968 he was gone and after we wept and after the anger we experienced and the disappointment we endured for a generation at the hands of those who tried to fill the void his death created, we somehow got on with our lives.
We were robbed of his voice, but his words still echo across the landscape of the American experience. As his brother Teddy said of him at his funeral,
“Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.”
Robert Francis Kennedy died June 6th, 1968. He was 42 years old.
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I was not alive for Bobby, however, I have heard many great things about him. Excellent post!