Bobby Kennedy

Forty years ago I was a student at a business school in Billings, Montana. I wanted to go to college, and my father said he'd help pay the way, but only if I went to business (secretarial) school first: something to fall back on. We had a dress code, I remember; jackets and ties for the men, and skirts, of course, for the women.

June 5, 1968, was an ordinary day. I have no recollection of it at all, until my brother called me late in the evening. My brother, who at seventeen had lied about his age, was with the McCarthy campaign in Los Angeles, and called to tell me to turn on the television. I spent most of the night watching the black-and-white t.v., and talking with my brother on the phone. Because he was there, I knew before it was reported that Bobby Kennedy had died.

It had been just five years since President Kennedy was killed, and only two months since the Martin Luther King assassination. Too many times in my young life I had sat in front of a television grieving the loss of hope. What did my generation learn from these losses?

The next morning I called to see if school would be in session, and it was, so I went. I went partly, I think, to be with other people, other Americans; others who had the same experience I did.

But they didn't have the same experience.

I was three classes into the day before the events of the night before were mentioned, and I'm the one who brought it up. I had always felt that this was another world, a world where I did not belong, but I hadn't realized just how drastically different it was. Here, at a conservative business school in 1968, the assassination of a Kennedy did not even merit mention. It was irrelevant.

I remember that day now as a blur of pain and confusion. The surreal quality had less to do with this -- to me, significant -- death, than the disinterest of the world around me. This was my first hard lesson in the different Americas. This was when I learned that we can live in one country, but different worlds. This is when I understood, in my gut, how it was that people could pretend there was no poverty, no discrimination, no undeserved suffering in our United States.

We still pretend. We still buy the pretense.

And some of us still experience anxiety in our gut when a new charismatic leader emerges, who reminds us that there is poverty, there is discrimination, there is undeserved suffering, and there is hope.

Comments

[Julie Carter]

The other day when Obama started his speech, I had a tough time looking at the TV. I am terrified for him.

[paisley]

where i am as a rule a political,, i can sympathize with the feeling that we live in a world that is essentially blind to anything and everything that does not touch the individual.. i live in an area of the world that is very elitist,, very self serving and entitled,, and they cannot see that the given norm here,, is all but ludicrus elsewhere.. although i love my house and my land and my privacy,, if i could trade in the people i would in a heart beat...

[barbara]

beautifully put. peace.

[Patia]

Yes, indeed. Obama holds the seeds of revolution within him, and that is always a threatening and frightening thing to those who have something to lose.