Through the Night (The Torch-Bearer Keeps Going)

They will say Barack Obama is the JFK of our generation.  But we’ll know better because we have already seen what a man like JFK can do.  And this man that they gift with his name is no JFK.

He doesn’t have the courage of his convictions-even late, when the damage is done and the jail cells are locked.   He doesn’t have the uneasy silences as he attempts to beat out the best course of action; as he tries to decide what’s right at the height of a crisis, when the missiles are armed and it’s do or die.  He doesn’t have the foresight to know he’s out of his depth, nor the hindsight to know when he’s gone too far.  He will say he is a symbol of America’s possibility.  They will say that he’s an American hero-even if nobody “sunk [his] battleship.”

If not that, they will say that he is Robert F. Kennedy then, but we’ll know better still, because we have seen what a man like Robert F. Kennedy can do-and this man that they try to paint in his colors is no Robert F. Kennedy.

Barack Obama, unlike another man he isn’t, does not have the heart to reach out to a people he’s never known, set foot in their shoes, and learn the dark hours of their lives.  He does not have the strength of will to tolerate being vilified by the powerful but beloved by the “small.” He does not have the resolve to come to life’s battles late and yet dare to compete. He does not have the nerve to shout   what is unpopular in the face of overwhelming opposition or to do the things that may cost him but that are fundamentally right.  He is not the man that no one living is.  He does not “dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

And yet, it would be a lie to say that no one has arisen with the gravitas and the knowledge to carry on the great progress that his brother began, Lyndon B. Johnson continued, and that given the grace Bobby himself might have brought to completion.  Many a politician with a particular flair for speech and for moving votes has been hailed as the new knight of a fallen throne, the fresh son of Camelot. Too often, they were proven false and the good deeds gone undone for so long simply fell, forgotten, to the wayside.

Once more a man gave a speech and the country fell in love with a fairy tale, surrendering their faith without question.  And when the family made so great by two lost sons said that it would be this man that would carry on their legacy, the People believed them, and surrendered their votes to the same. In sad imitation of so many times before, those people that fell in love fell out, only to see that the man that promised them Camelot is the one who burned it down.  Barack Obama is no Bobby Kennedy, certainly no John, and he never was.

It does a disservice to his memory to say that any human being who dares to open his mouth and speak a moving sentence is the RFK of his generation.  It takes more than having the ability to speak aloud to step into the shoes of a political lion and not trip on the shoe strings left unknotted by time.  Robert F. Kennedy is not a mere archetype of a profile in courage.  He is no more an expendable placeholder for history than his brother, John.  He was a man and he lived only once.  There was only one.

In the final speech of his life Robert Francis Kennedy said, “Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.” June 6th, 1968, the hope of a nation, the son of a father, and the brother and torch-bearer of a legacy fell for good.  Many of the dreams he shouldered by way of a ballot have come true yet many still wait and gather dust in the catacombs of his story and the story of this great country.   Just as the annals of human progress were deprived of their innovation and courage, the tumultuous times were deprived of their leadership-in action and inaction, and perhaps, as we will never know, the future is the worse for it.

“The future does not belong to those who are

content with today, apathetic toward common

problems and their fellow man alike, timid and

fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas.

Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion,

reason and courage in a personal commitment to the

great enterprises and ideals of American society.”

No man or woman stepped forward to fill the slowly cooling mold of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and so it was never filled.  Sadly, we never got our RFK either.  The darkest moments of the present invoke us to think fondly on days gone by, but most especially of those that never were.

There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

–Robert F. Kennedy, 6-8-64

It is easy and convenient to convince ourselves that we are facing the future, but when we have to reach back in order to assure ourselves that tomorrow has to come some way, somehow, we’ aren’t fooling anyone.  We seek still to find martyred men and warriors in the eyes of people here today because this day and age is new, and we still can’t stop hoping.

Without belittling the courage with which men

have died, we should not forget those acts of

courage with which men…have lived.  The

courage of life is often a less dramatic

spectacle than the courage of a final moment;

but it is no less a magnificent mixture of

triumph and tragedy.

JFK, Profiles in Courage, 1956

This night, as so many painful ones before, we know the loud pang of tragedy.  When faced with History reproached, recycled, reviled, and revised, this is what we’ve got.  It isn’t beautiful or quote-worthy. It will not lift whole houses clear off the ground.  It doesn’t even give us hope that anything will change. It won’t.

But there is something to be won. We know ourselves. We know our allies, we know our mission and we know our truth.  Only one person truly carried the banner of Camelot proudly above their head. Only one person dared step into sacrosanct shoes of Robert Kennedy and only one person dreamed of how things could be and said, “I can .”  We’ve seen a person like him, a woman like him, who can sit in his seat and inspire his masses. She could do what he could do.  She could do what he never could.  If any one person embodies the man Robert F. Kennedy was, it’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the junior Senator from New York.

And just as we were denied our Bobby, we never got our Hillary either and that wound will sting the young when they’re aching with age and the old when they look back in those last seconds and think, “What could have been.”

Yet we can never surrender to hopelessness when there is one thing left to accomplish.  And when I think about giving up and sitting down, I remember this:

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time… “

Just keep going. Someday our day will come.

And with I conclude my year-long foray into Presidential Politics. I got what I paid for. I guess I just wasn’t rich enough. Good luck, America, and Godspeed.

~ by Regency on November 5, 2008.