August 6, 2007

The Once and Future King

“…Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done.

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our bothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember “ even if only for a time “ that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”
-Robert Kennedy

I recently heard Robert Kennedy speak these words, part of a speech given at the City Club in Cleveland Ohio. A recording, of course, of when he first delivered them in that fateful, terrible year of 1968.

In the spring of that year, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin's bullet in Memphis. Vietnam raged, taking with it the young lives of thousands of Americans, while racial tensions and civil unrest left many parts of American cities in flames.

Desperate to make sense of it and find hope for an uncertain future, people gravitated toward Senator Kennedy’s vision and expression of purpose; of what he believed this nation can and should be.

I was ten years old then, my whole cognizant experience of the outside world up to then had begun with the assassination of Robert’s brother, followed by the menacing fear of nuclear annihilation , a war in a far-off and unknown place called Vietnam, and riots in the streets of America, all playing out on a black and white TV in our living room.

The world seemed to be falling apart, and Robert Kennedy helped many to believe that, despite all this, there was still reason to believe in America, that we could collectively live up to her founding ideals.

Bobby never made it to the presidency, of course, and nobody will ever know what might have been. If the hope and faith placed in him and his vision would have translated into a new and transformed America shall forever remain unknown.

But that there was hope on that hot June night there is no doubt; tenuous, unsure, but there it was. And just as suddenly, in that terrible year of 1968, to the horror, once again, of a nation that looked on in disbelief, it was gone. Another sucker-punch that left the world reeling. Taken by the specter of violence, the act of one fear-addled individual translating into a symptom of the sickness of the soul of which Kennedy spoke. A sickness that strikes back at any expression of its own undoing. Fear fueling violence against a message of “hope”.

I was young then, but looking back on it from today’s perspective and alleged maturity, I’m not sure if America has ever really recovered from those assassinations: JFK, MLK, and then RFK.

In these three individuals, Americans – indeed people from all over the world – dared the innocence of hope, of a belief in the potential of the human spirit, and each time it was suddenly, violently and publicly cut down.

And instead of the world Bobby believed in coming to fruition, leading us along with him, violence lingered and grew, and we withdrew into self-concern, suspicion, and cynicism.

Since then we have had very little in the way of leaders that can inspire the best in us. Certainly enough people to take control, but few, if any, to truly lead.

We have cartoonish leaders that rely solely on “swagger and bluster”, all too eager to “wield force” in the name of nothing more than their firm belief that, whatever they do, it is in the name of what is Good and Right, and so therefore they can do no wrong. Which isn’t leadership at all, really. Intransigence and arrogance is perhaps a method to maintain some control, but is not a basis for wise leadership. Fear is a poor motivator for bringing out the best in people, or giving them much hope.

Hope denotes something unfulfilled, and a promise that one day that something may be realized. And “hope” is also a word that is bandied about with seeming impunity from overuse; nonetheless diminishing its meaning, making it little more than a marketing buzzword.

There are no grand themes today. I feel uninspired by anyone that professes the audacity of thinking he or she should be president (though admittedly, the bar is currently at a remarkably low ebb).

I’m waiting for something or someone to come along that can counter what then becomes “hopelessness”, but if it is there, it remains quiet. There are no clear voices that I can hear that inspires much else but fear and division; at best confusion and well-packaged rhetoric.

It is too easy, however, to give in. If there are none to offer us hope and inspire us, then we have no choice but to do it ourselves.

And how do we do that? By reflecting on the words of people that at least had the vision of a better world, the eloquence to express it, and the courage to truly believe in it.

To destroy the individual is not to destroy the idea they expressed. We can build on that.

Those were desperate times back then, even a pointy-headed, half-blind kid of ten could tell that.

These are pretty desperate times now, even though it seems that many choose to ignore it. And it is the nature of how things sometimes shift balance that a voice will appear on the horizon. One with a vision of a better world. Not one the “offers a desert and calls it peace”, but that inspires a next, halting step to a better world, a sustainable and just society, and a chance to find a “Once and Future King”.

That’s what I’m hoping anyway.