Remembering Robert Kennedy

In 1992-93, i dressed up every day as a conservative version of Scarlett O'Hara to give tours and expound on american history at Arlington House, located atop the national military cemetery of that same name. Often before the stiff bike ride up the hill, i would stop at the Kennedy brothers' graves to read the text inscribed there from Robert Kennedy's famous 1966 speech in South Africa. Looking at the whole text of that speech now, here is the part that i want to share, for the words strike me as especially relevant both personally and globally (relevancy being a key motivator in my personal search for meaning).

For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger, my friends, is comfort, the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says, "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged, will ultimately judge himself, on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

Today is the anniversary of then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968. As a rule disinclined to wax prosaic about mainstream politic figures from any country, i nevertheless find it easy to respect and important to remember RFK as a man increasingly driven by his conscious; given the outcome of that 1968 election, it's hard not to imagine that if he had moved into the oval office in 1969, a lot of things in both the US and Southeast Asia would have turned out differently. As much as anyone in his position could, he walked the talk and was a source of inspiration for many people, my younger pre-cynical self included.

Political radicals' and professional politicians' circles rarely, if ever overlap (Mandela being an obvious exception). i tend to discover my personal heros/heroines from among the former, but i'm willing to accept that dealing with a population scale of billions, politicians who are real leaders are what we still need to hope for, especially from the perspective of global climate and resource management. RFK was most certainly one of them, my inner anarchist has no problem acknowledging this.

He is also quoted as having said, "What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.' Lately, i've found myself trying to convey this exact message to those Muslim students and acquaintances who passionately want to convert me to their belief system, though my own words are much less eloquent ('i respect your right to believe whatever you want, and i hope one day you'll understand this is much more important than respecting your specific beliefs'). i strive to live on the right side of the tolerance/intolerance equation - not always so easy, given my feminist framework - we would all be better off if the more rigidly indoctrinated among us attempted to do the same. RFK stood by his allies and empowered people to tap deeper into their humanity. How many people were killed by electronically controlled drones today? Whatever the number, it's good cause for remembering Bobby Kennedy.