"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others." ~ Robert F. Kennedy, April 5, 1968, Cleveland, Ohio (in a speech given the day after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
I was not yet a year old when President John F. Kennedy was murdered. I had only recently celebrated my fifth birthday when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were murdered.
Along the way and shortly thereafter, in the United States political-cultural sphere were Vietnam and its images, and the associated anti-war rallies and civil rights marches streaming in through the newspapers and televisions.
Then there was Nixon and Watergate; the too-smart, too-kind Jimmy Carter and the Iran-hostage mess; John Lennon gunned down; the Iran-Contra scandal; the Greed is Good era and its savings and loan scandal; and so on through the Eighties and Nineties and the turn of the Millennium with its dot-com-Greed is Good (again); scads of money that appeared out of nowhere; the dot-com bomb; the pseudo-energy 'crisis'; Enron and myriad White House-Big Corporate 'accounting' scandals; an extended 'great recession'; money that went back to whatever 'nowhere' it had emerged from; another war based on more lies and no end in sight; Wall Street crashing the national and global economy; and on it goes.
Along the way, we've lived our lives, creating and contributing what we could. Pretty surreal, actually.
Watching the movie Bobby, written and directed by Emelio Estevez, took me back to the beginning of my life, and the era whose energies and images soaked into my psyche during my formative years.
Whenever I hear the audios from Robert Kennedy's speeches, or see the images from his campaign, it taps a well of sadness so deep, not just within me but within all of us that each of us can feel -- that dulled, far-away, packed-away heart-break -- whether we're aware of it or not.
It's no wonder that people of my generation can't relate to our parents' unquestioning trust of the government and the corporation -- The Man, whom they saw as a stern but fair-enough Father who gave them a day's pay for a day's work and maybe, if they were lucky, a gold watch at the end -- 'security' which kept them from even thinking about straying from the status quo.
Life, they thought, included certain inalienable rights and things you just got to take for granted, whether or not they were true underneath. What mattered was that, on the surface, all appeared idyllic. Like the movie Pleasantville.
Until the façade comes dripping off showing the real-deal mess in technicolor, like a David Lynch film.
Enter the Sixties, and an emerging worldview smashes full-on, comet-like, into the halcyon paradigm of glove-wearing ladies and faux smiles on the faces marching down Main Streets in summertime parades, while knocking back vodka and valium behind closed doors to keep that Stepford thing safe.
Suddenly, streets and college campuses are filled with rock music, world music, drugs, free love, hippies, tie-dye, belly buttons, and protests against the government and The Man that weren't supposed to be questioned, no matter what they were doing behind the curtain.
You were supposed to quickly avert your eyes and pretend it didn't exist;and you definitely were not supposed to make a big stink, a loud protest, and rip the curtain aside to reveal the appalling reality!
Add to this scene, the War Hawks and hardliners going mano a mano with the noblisse oblige of the Northeastern liberal democrats, who happened to be in positions of power and openly uttering -- or charismatically preaching -- dangerous words like virtue, hope, decency, diplomacy, integrity, charity, love, understanding, peace, and democracy.
Those are dangerous ideas. They reach beneath the vodka-and-valium daze and stir it up.
Yet as in any king's court during this Patriarchal, warring age, "Treachery is everywhere."
War is Patriarchy's long-established way to big money and new markets and 'raw materials'; and fear and rule-following status-quo'ers are the way it all keeps flowing. Or at least, flowing out of the public coiffures and into very certain pockets and bank accounts.
Army General and President Ike Eisenhower -- a Republican and tried-and-true military man -- warned as well: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded."
Industry requires raw material and 'the need': the military industrial complex requires soldiers, wars, and fearful, flag-waving, non-thinking or scared-silent citizens; the criminal-industrial complex requires criminals and the conditions that create criminals -- poverty and fuel tossed on us-versus-them complexes; the drug-cartel complex requires drug addicts and conditions that have people running to 'pharma-out'. And so on.
Idealism, peace, diplomacy, democracy, egalitarianism, hope, compassion, real faith, real virtue, real spirituality -- these have, in the Age of Patriarchy and War Machines, always been the True Power that those in power feared most.
And in the Nineteen-Sixties -- a decade that shaped a large swathe of Baby Boomers and early Generation Xers like myself -- we saw one battle between the two: the Old Guard Patridigm, and the New Era spiritual warriors.
So the assassins of the former gunned down the symbols of the latter -- JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon -- in an attempt not just to retain control and keep the War Machine and the coiffures that depended on it liberally greased, but to kill the movement that most endangered it, and the hope and spirit of a generation.
That's really what the battle is about, and who it is between: Hope, and the Killers of Hope. Faith, and the Killers of Faith. Compassion, and the Killers of Compassion. Love, and the Killers of Love. Truth, and the Killers of Truth. Belief, and the Killers of Belief.
And they probably thought they pulled it off. But as Emile Zola wrote, "If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
There are those who think that taking a life is the worst form of murder. And yet, while taking a life is abhorrent, killing hope, faith, compassion, Love and belief is by far the worse crime, because it creates not only fields and streets of actual dead but also legions of walking dead.
It is time for the Killers to be apprehended and held accountable. It is time to say a loud, righteous, Holy NO to their reign. It is time to step out of tepidness and into Sacred Fury. It is time to step into the fierce and unflinching courage of the Heart.
It's time to reclaim within us what was systematically subdued or stunned through relentless 'shock and awe', and in doing so, reclaim the culture that affirms life -- not in a hypocritical, dogmatic or religious way that purports to advocate for one facet of life while supporting wholesale slaughter and a cult of death.
But rather an affirmation of Life that begins with a reverence of the Life that we are, the Life that sustains us, and ripples outward in waves of awe for Life in its myriad demonstrations.
[This was originally written in-flight on May 22, 2007, as I was en route from London to San Francisco.]
Though I wasn't even born when Bobby was killed, watching the movie "Bobby" I got the same feeling...that those bastards managed to kill hope and that is where this nation went so terribly wrong.
Affirming life is good, leading by example is good, but how to heal the legions of the walking dead, who do not realize their zombie existence?
Posted by: axydlbaaxr | September 03, 2007 at 09:19 AM