Proclaiming the Legacy of Hope

I was 16 years old when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Fifty years later, my soul still weeps.  What today would be a four-letter word in politics, marks his legacy and meaning for me: HOPE.

He did not live a sainted life. He was an aide to the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who lent his name to one of the most anti-American “isms” native to U.S. soil. Robert was regarded by many as the ruthless brother ready and willing to crush his rivals. But by 1968, having gone through the crucible of his brother John’s death, having examined his fears and his pedestal of privilege, he felt free to speak and act for himself. He began to reach out to people who otherwise had no full membership in our society.

He was changing, and the change came about by listening and learning from people of all backgrounds who were living in poverty or near to it. In his campaign he spoke of peace, justice, compassion toward those who suffer. I believe that’s what the United States should stand for. When he studied our gross national product, a great indicator of our immense wealth, he was quoted as saying: “it measures neither our wit nor courage, neither our wisdom or our learning, neither our compassion nor devotion to country . . ..” In a speech to the South Africans, he talked about each one of us reaching out to make a better world for others as “ripples of hope” that could build a current that can sweep down the mighty walls of oppression and resistance. And who could ever forget his paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and ask why, I dream things that never were and ask why not!” And as a young 16-year-old “why not” was a question my generation was asking our leaders about getting out of the war in Vietnam.

More significant to me, Bobby Kennedy was the last white presidential politician in my lifetime who reached out to African-Americans and white working-class people. He was on the verge of building a successful coalition when he was gunned down. But eventually we elected Richard Nixon and his politics of law and order (how ironic as he was the Great Lawbreaker) seeding a second Jim Crow that began the mass incarceration of many young black citizens. Next came Ronald Reagan and his myth of the black welfare queen – creating and enhancing white imaginings that black people were lazy and given to sucking off the system.

I find this to be an incredible case of amnesia. It seems that many who readily bought and buy into Reagan’s myth have no awareness of how much American chattel slavery created so much wealth and privilege on the backs of Black men and women. He politicized his fear of being thrown out of office by white people who would see him as pandering to black people and being too soft on presumably black crime. After that, we had the dog-whistle politics of George H. W. Bush signaling the need to fear black crime by vilifying all black men with the injection of William Horton (converted to Willie in the public imagination) into his presidential campaign against Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. Horton was African American:  a convicted felon who committed a violent crime while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Never mind that the furlough program had been started by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor and expanded by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the Bush campaign seized on the opportunity to gain political advantage by stoking the fires of racial fears and resentment. As his campaign manager Lee Atwater put it: “Before we’re done people are going to think that Willie Horton is Mike Dukakis’ running mate”.  (It is reported that he repented of his incendiary tactics actions shortly before his death.) Then we had Bill Clinton who continued the policies of Nixon – hastening the pace of incarcerating more of our African-American brothers and sisters during his administration than under any other president.

So now after decades of race-baiting political campaigns, we have reaped Donald Trump. He threw out the pretense of dog whistles preferring to blatantly and proudly tweet racist rants, giving permission for us all to act on our worst impulses. Will we continue to act out of despair and fear? Will we look at black woman and say to ourselves, there goes another “taker”? Will Americans hear someone speak Spanish and call ICE? Will we look at the poor and decide they deserve their impoverished state? Will we give up on what President Lincoln described as “our better angels”? Will we allow our great country that has so much promise become a place of deferred dreams? Will we give up on hope?

In the poem “’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers”, Emily Dickinson wrote:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers-

That perches in the soul-

And sings the tune without the words-

And never stops – at all “

Bobby Kennedy will not be one of the “exhausted volcanoes of history” as Disraeli puts it-not like Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush or Trump whose legacies will take on less and less meaning or memory over time. No, Bobby Kennedy’s legacy will live, it will remain fresh, vibrant, unsettling, and forever challenging because his is a legacy that lives within the American soul. His is a legacy that sings the tune that in our hearts of hearts we know  who we are and who we want to be.

Be well,

Bill