Nearly 40 years ago (the anniversary is coming up on June 6, 2006) Robert Francis Kennedy delivered a speech at the University of Cape Town in South Africa from which many often borrow the famous sentence:
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
The full text of the speech is available here http://www.jfklibrary.net/...
But even nicer, there is an audio recording available at that link. I'd suggest playing the recording in the background while reading on below or when reading other diaries during the course of the day.
I sometimes reminisce about the Bobby Kennedy campaign in 1968 thinking about how different the course of American and World History would have been had he not been assassinated in June, 1968 and had he won the Democratic Nomination instead of Hubert Humphrey and been elected president instead of Richard Nixon. I am certainly a "grey beard" but have the privilige of remembering back to 1968 as the first Presidential campaign in which I invested my hope and my energy.
Today, I want to suggest that we consider Bobby Kennedy as exemplified by his Cape Town speech and compare our current crop of Presidential Candidates to that standard. Which of the candidates being considered and talked about even attempts to inspire us as people to reach our potential and talks about the kind of world we want to live in.
The University of Cape Town Speech is usually referred to as the Ripple of Hope speech, but there is another beautiful phrase in a paragraph just before it. "A world that we would all be proud to have built."
More than this I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress -- not material welfare as an end in of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built.
We can do better then selecting a candidate because she has raised more money then god, or because he succeeded in raising taxes and balancing the budget in Virginia and certainly better then just a candidate who we think can help bring in one middle south state or another. We deserve a candidate who when he or she assumes the Presidency in January 2009 can inspire us as a nation to climb the Hills of Acropolis.