“Our gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
“It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth while. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
If Don McLean was right and Feb. 3, 1959, was the day the music died, then this week might be the 58th anniversary of the night that what was good about American politics died.
President John F. Kennedy once said no political assassination had ever changed history, and it’s at least arguable that his own death in 1963 fits that statement. But four and a half years later, when his younger brother was shot and killed after winning the California presidential primary, it led to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and yes, even to Donald Trump.
There are plenty of people who don’t believe in heroes anymore, who refuse to accept the goodness in people like Bobby Kennedy. They tell you about all the mistakes he made, the bad things he was part of when he was younger. They tell you he worked for Joe McCarthy, that he cheated on his wife, that he was ruthless in promoting his older brother’s run for president.
There are actually two types of people who do this — the ones who are desperate to discredit him and those who refuse to believe people grow up and manage to change for the better.
Bobby changed for the better.
He may have been the last candidate who would appeal — without pandering — both to poor minorities and the white working class. On the day Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, there were riots in every major American city except one. Bobby was speaking to a black audience in Indianapolis when he delivered the news.
Sadly, he had two months to live.
I can’t claim this as mine, but I don’t remember where I heard it. Most candidates spoke in simple prose, but Bobby Kennedy spoke in poetry. Imagine an America where the Vietnam War ended in 1969, where there was no Watergate scandal.
So much would have changed had Bobby lived.
Imagine an America where there was no massive deregulation or no huge tax cuts for the rich, an America in which we didn’t have the widest income inequality in the western world.
I could take it further from there, but let’s just say our country would be a far less hate-filled place than it is today.
Yes, there was a political assassination that changed history for the worse.
A lot worse.
Wonder what he’d think about how his son turned out…