I find myself crying a lot lately. They’re tears of loss. They’re tears of joy. They’re tears of finally understanding.
They’re tears of loss because I still miss my grandmother, a woman who sacrificed much in order to help raise many of her grandchildren. I still remember my last conversations with her. One on the Fourth of July, a holiday that his a huge party to my family – the classic African-American cookout that you see represented accurately occasionally in movies and TV shows.
My grandmother knew that she was dying but she willed herself better to make it that holiday, to impart her final words of wisdom to her children and grandchildren. For me, it was simple: ‘’I’m proud of you,’’ she said through tears. "I’m going to miss you. You take care of those two boys (her great grandsons)."
Two short days later something told me to stop by her home, a home I once lived, to see her. I did so on my way to work to cover something or another. But I knew nothing else was more important that day than to see her. Her final words to me: "Look at all that gray, boy. It looks good on you." Being the oldest grandson, I knew what she was saying: "God blessed me enough to be able for me to see you grow into a man with a family of your own." The next day my grandmother was gone. It’s a living part of me that’s been filled with memories and her spirit.
I cry tears of joy because I know that my grandmother would be happy to see what is happening with Barack Obama. She would have voted for him in a New York minute. Grandma would approve. She’d be happy, the daughter of the segregated South to see how far we’d come. Somewhere, Grandma is smiling.
I cry tears of understanding, for finally having a politician who moves me to think, to feel, to understand – one who makes me care. It became all that much clearer as I began reading a book that I bought ages ago, but never had the time to read. With me traveling more for business, I suddenly have plenty of time. Therefore, I dug deep into Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign, which chronicled the primary campaign of Robert F. Kennedy in the Spring of 1968.
Clarke’s telling offered a detailed and tragic look into what make Kennedy tick, what drove him to evolve into who he became and the more I read The Last Campaign, the more I agreed with the quote below from Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, who said this about Obama:
"I think he feels it. He feels it just like Bobby did, He has the passion in his heart. He's not selling you. It's just him." Ethel Kennedy invited Obama to deliver the keynote address at a ceremony commemorating the 80th birthday of Robert F. Kennedy. She said she had carefully followed the career of the Illinois senator, whom she referred to as "our next president."
Mrs. Kennedy’s words couldn’t be more prescient. But as I read The Last Campaign, it became more and more evident that in this generation, there is no one else that the Kennedys could transfer their legacy to other than Obama. Bill Clinton craved it, but never got it. There are just too many commonalities between RFK and Obama for the Kennedys to ignore.
Clarke wrote about RFK’s speech to students at the University of Indiana in Bloomington regarding the Vietnamese War in that year:
"He began: "Long ago it was said, ‘The time for taking a lesson from history is ever at hand for those who are wise," and what follows makes for painful reading. Substitute Iraq for Vietnam and terrorist for communist and the speech becomes one that four decades later a president could deliver verbatim."
Or this advice that Kennedy gave to Jerry Abramson, who headed Students for Kennedy at U of I on dodging the draft, whom he advised to submit to the service:
Once he had become influential then he would have a moral responsibility to make a difference and draw attention to issues like Vietnam and poverty. Abramson was drafted, served in the armed forces, attended law school...entered public service, and later became mayor of Louisville, Kentucky. He believes that when Kennedy told him to work within the system, play the game, wait until you reach a position of influence, then use your visibility to make a difference, he was explaining why he had decided to run for president.
Much the same could be said about Obama, who started as a community organizer to empower people but continued to work within the system until reaching the point he finds himself now. In a position to lead, but empowering those around him in the process.
Want another parallel? RFK was a Democrat who realized what effect that welfare could have on an individual or family. I can attest to that fact. When you’re a teenager growing up in a middle-middle class suburb, you don’t like showing up at the grocery store where your friends shop with food stamps. It stigmatizes you even when your mother tells you that there’s no shame in it. Kennedy also believed in empowering people:
He believed this could only be accomplished through a program of community reconstruction that created new enterprises and dignified jobs in inner-city neighborhoods, Clarke writes. Instead of a massive federal program, he wanted a partnership between private enterprise and community organizations that was the opposite of Johnson’s Great Society programs.
There are so many more parallels that can be drawn by reading Clarke’s enthralling book, he cites Arthur Schlesinger’s introduction in Robert Kennedy: In his Own Words:
"Soon the dam will break, as it broke at the turn of the century, again in the 1930s, again in the 1960s. Sometime around the year 1990, if the rhythm holds, we can expect a breakthrough into a new and generous epoch in American life. What that time comes, the Kennedy ideals will no longer seem so exotic." That dam has still not burst. Perhaps the mortar of complacency, selfishness, and cynicism holding it together is indestructible. But if it ever does burst, then Robert Kennedy’s ideals, and his campaign will suddenly seem very relevant.
The dam is bursting. People here and all over the United States are making it happen this year and on Tuesday. My African-American sons will know that they can grow up to be president if they work hard enough. But what consoles me regarding my tears of loss is the fact that my grandmother and Robert F. Kennedy are looking down together – smiling.