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ACCORDING TO LIZ - June 6 may be commemorated by some as the day 160,000 Allied soldiers landed in Normandy, but for many who lived through the ups and downs of the 1960s, it is the anniversary of a Robert Kennedy speech that transformed the world.
It was a decade of sweeping change in the United States. What some of us remember as exciting progress, others found terrifying.
The sexual revolution, the embrace of women’s rights, the rise of Black power, Kent State and the Vietnam embroglio, the race to save the environment, draft dodgers, revelations of CIA misadventures in foreign countries, and the misbehavior of Hoover here at home.
The fall of the American Camelot with JFK’s assassination, the rebirth of hope with the rise of RFK and MLK. Then their murders.
Today, as searing political pain again tears the country apart, let’s turn to words from and about that earlier era.
Starting with Kennedy’s 1966 Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Cape Town in which he talked about liberty and freedom, about the challenges facing the United States and South Africa. About the challenge for young people in both countries to have the courage to face seemingly insurmountable odds and retain the belief, that working together, they could create a better world.
“First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills — against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. 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.”
Kennedy goes on to talk about the world we would like to build; one built on hope. Sound familiar?
That it was up to the youth of that day – and, now, today – to tip the fulcrum away from obsolete dogma and in favor of peaceful progress.
“So the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer – not just to the wealthy; not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race; but to all of the people.
“It is your job, the task of the young people in this world to strip the last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief [of racism] from the civilization of man.”
But change is never easy.
“‘There is,’ said an Italian philosopher, ‘nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.’ Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation and the road is strewn with many dangers.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.
Kennedy then pointed out that in “new technology and communications [bringing] men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably become the concerns of all… stripping away the… illusion of differences which is at the root of injustice and hate and war.”
Following that first danger of futility, RFK went on to say:
“The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course if we must act effectively, we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feeling of young people across the world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspiration and deep convictions are not incompatible
“A third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change
“For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.”
Today we face so many of the same issues. And today we must develop the cojones to rise above futility, to firmly clasp hands across widening divides, to forsake short term expediency in favor of reaching the top of the mountain and entering the promised land, one fashioned from the hopes of new generations not throttled by the fears and greed and the desire to maintain a stultifying status quo.
We must risk. We must stand up to the powers vowing to take us back to the way things used to be… in return for all of us turning over our rights and freedoms.
For the pictures they paint are A.I.-enhanced lures pulling us down a path of their own choosing, not ours, and leading to further oppression.
Instead, the current generation, all of today’s generations, must seize the hope and the energy and the joy of building the promised lands of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Let the ripple that Kennedy talked about and the current it presaged become the roar of a rising tide to topple the walls of oppression that the House of Trump has built.
RFK’s June 6, 1966, Day of Affirmation Address in South Africa [[[https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/day-of-affirmation-address-university-of-capetown-june-6-1966]]]
