I listened to Ted Kennedy's eulogy tonight and felt a sudden hunger to hear the sound of Robert Kennedy's voice. I was eighteen years old when he was gunned down. I saw him speak maybe two days before his murder. He was at a synagogue in Portland, Oregon on his way to the California primary.
I remember the morning of June 6, forty years ago, waking up to my father's voice. My bedroom was in the basement and I had an intercom, high-tech communication for 1968. My father's voice oddly tinny in that little box, calling me out of sleep. I remember sitting up, rubbing my eyes thinking what's he talking about? Thinking what a stupid, terrible thing to say, to tease about. I should have known better: I was thirteen when they shot John Kennedy, seventeen when they took out Martin Luther King and, anyway, my father didn't make those kind of jokes. It shouldn't have been so shocking. It shouldn't have been so hard to make sense of his words, to wake up to the truth of the matter, but it was.
I'd gone to hear Kennedy speak by myself, driven myself across town, found the place and sat rapt and alive, so in awe of the man, so ready to dedicate my life to political struggle, and to making him president. I remember the excitement of being close enough to shake his hand. How shy I felt to be in the presence of such a charismatic individual. It was 1968. I was against the Vietnam war, ready to believe we could change the world.
I was also ripe for the cynicism that collapsed cold and hard against me that morning as I stumbled upstairs.
Maybe there's something healing in all this: for me, it's a deepening of my understanding that my enthusiasm for Barack Obama is, in part, about the young people who've come out in droves to support him. I know what it feels like and I don't want them to suffer the numbing disillusionment that I was forced to wrestle with for all these years.
The torch is indeed being passed.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.