I watched “RFK” last night — which was a two parter on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE years ago.  It was emotional as all get out for me.

 

I bought the DVD of it because I want it in my collection of RFK materials.

 

Not Much Has Changed, Sadly…

 

Today we’re fighting the same battles RFK fought, which is sad commentary on what three generations of white Americans have done (or failed to do) to keep the ball from moving forward from marginalization to fashioning a level playing field for all.

 

Oh, there have been improvements, for sure, but for several generations (since at least 1980), the GOP has been obsessed with rolling them back and making rich white male supremacist oligarchs the only truly viable people in the nation. And these days they’re on steroids, no holds barred!

 

The only problem is that rich, white, racist, xenophobic male supremacist oligarchs are despots, sociopathic and greedy. They don’t care how long the planet remains inhabitable or how many other people have to continue to suffer to maintain their status.

 

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

 

If oligarchs were true stewards (caretakers) of people and the planet, oligarchy wouldn’t be such a scourge. But “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and they have lost their way (if they ever had it) as far as their sense of responsibility for bequeathing a safe, healthy planet to their descendants and the rest of us who need it as acutely as their progeny do. They could learn a lot from the Native American perspective when it comes to the environment!

 

They’re myopic. They can’t see beyond their vanity and hoards of money.

 

What I would do with billions of dollars would look entirely different than what they do with their money. Even their philanthropy is anemic when compared to how much wealth they have. (Melinda French Gates has stated this herself recently.)

 

What sticks with me about RFK is that he learned as he grew, every single day

 

He started out as a rich white kid who later admitted as Attorney General that he hadn’t sat up nights thinking about the white privilege he was born into, or how other people survive who aren’t born into wealthy families. It just wasn’t on his radar.

 

Until it was.

 

He struggled to understand, until he began witnessing (as Attorney General) white supremacists’ malice and treachery. Then he began walking and talking to their victims. He simply couldn’t look at a starving black, brown, Native American, or white poverty-stricken child’s distended belly or visit their ramshackle dwellings without thinking of his own kids and how lucky they were to be born white into a family of such wealth and privilege as he and they were.

 

As tragedies, crises and misfortunes began to happen to his family (multiple tragic deaths and disabilities when he was younger, his father’s debilitating stroke, his brother Ted’s plane crash, and his other brother’s assassination in 1963, ) his heart began to  expand beyond his own family’s pain and interests, and he took a good look around — only to see tragedies, crises, and misfortunes in abundance everywhere he looked, many of them not acts of God but acts of vicious, violent men who regarded themselves as naturally superior to people of color and women.

 

The servant heart he was born with (which had been forged into a lean, mean fighting machine by the example of his father) began to return to its original shape, it’s loving essence, and he couldn’t un-see what he had seen. He wanted to help create “a newer world” that would “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.”

 

BUTTERFLY BOBBY

 

Emerging from his chrysalis, RFK became, after JFK’s death, an adversary of the Vietnam War and a far fiercer advocate and ally of Native Americans, migrant workers, Hispanics and Black people, stating just 40 years before Barack Obama became President that he could envision a Black president of the U.S, within 40 years. (Alas, he didn’t live long enough to see that prophecy fulfilled. He should have.)

 

What we mourn, I think, as the RFK documentary states, is the loss of  a future that he seemed uniquely qualified to lead us to.  How very different the U.S, would be today had he lived and become President.  I don’t think there would have been a Nixon/Agnew/Watergate Conspiracy presidency, a Reagan presidency, a Bush/Cheney presidency, or a Trump Presidency because RFK would have inspired and steered us toward a nation that lives out the true meaning of its vaunted creed and ideals (that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), and the vast majority of voters would have embraced it. It is a lovely vision to hold in our hearts as we make decisions every day that create our future!

 

Alas! Instead of the U.S. leading the world to a better place, we have become an object of pity and disappointment to those outside our borders. We’ve let down  far too many people who believed in our aspirations (for ourselves and for them) as much as so many of us still do.

 

We’re heading back in the right direction with Biden-Harris, but we still have a helluva long way to go to reach “the newer world” that RFK envisioned.

 

“Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” 

I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?'”

(RFK often ended his speeches with this line from George Bernard Shaw)

 

Why not, indeed?!