Remembering Bobby Kennedy is irrelevant to our changed conditions — except for one thing

© 2018 Peter Free

 

06 June 2018

 

 

Columnist Leonard Pitts got this right

 

He wrote that:

 

 

In many ways, Bobby Kennedy [see here] was an unlikely figure for mom’s great grief, a slightly built rich man with an upper crust accent . . . .

 

Then Jack was killed.

 

In the five years between that tragedy and his own assassination in Los Angeles while running for president, a different Robert Kennedy emerged.

 

He’s the one who went to Bed-Stuy, Appalachia and other broken places politicians often do not go. He’s the one who went to California to join Cesar Chavez as he ended a 25-day hunger strike.

 

He’s the one who went to the Mississippi Delta, knelt on a dirt floor and tried to coax a listless baby whose stomach was swollen by hunger.

 

He let those kinds of things get to him, let them trouble, shatter and remake him. He reached out to people living on the margins . . . .

 

There was in that last ragged campaign of his, this sense of the possible, of the new, of fundamental, systemic change. There was this sense of a more compassionate America waiting just below the horizon.

 

Fifty years later, as immigrant children are taken from their parents at the U.S. border, as the rich get richer while the poor work full-time jobs for part-time pay, as hatred flows from the top of our government, hope feels like a bygone relic of an outmoded age, like blood from a wound that never healed.

 

© 2018 Leonard Pitts, ‘At least we still have Bobby Kennedy.’ Then Bobby was gone, Miami Herald (01 June 2018)

 

 

I'm older than Mr. Pitts. My sorrow paralleled his mother's.

 

After losing Dr. King to murder, Bobby Kennedy's elimination seemed too much. It was, figuratively, as if Evil were mowing justice down. In my estimation, the nation never recovered.

 

 

The moral? — Bobby Kennedy is still relevant . . .

 

. . . not because we need to mourn what might have been — but because his impassioned example demonstrates how abysmally far this nation exists from societal fairness.

 

History provides saints, devils and paradigms.

 

Choose one.

 

Non-ignorantly bloom the change you seek.

 

Be Martin — or Bobby — or . . .