June 5, 1968

Bobby Kennedy speaking in Cleveland on April 5, 1968. He was shot by Sirhan Sirhan 2 months later in Los Angeles, California immediately following a speech to his supporters to celebrate his victory in the Democratic Presidential primary.

His brother, Ted, gave a eulogy at St. Patrick's Cathedral and said,

"My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

I wonder what America would have been like with Robert Kennedy as its President. Then, as now, we are faced with a war with no end. In 1968, the nation dealt with a counterculture that rebelled against everything they were taught (now those same counterculturists tell us "don't do as we did...it's sinful!"). The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was fresh on the mind of Americans. Rioting in urban areas had happened across the country.

Today, we face different challenges. We are faced with rising prices, with stagnant wages, with a falling dollar, with health care out of reach for millions of Americans. We struggle with Abu Gharib, with Guantanamo Bay, with the long solitary confinement of Americans (and others) charged with terrorism and other crimes, with a Patriot Act that allows the government to read email, listen to phone calls, and review library records. We see movie actors and sports stars paid millions upon millions of dollars, while nickel and dimeing enlisted soldiers for uniforms lost when their humvees were attacked.

We are now a nation where your actions do not count nearly as loudly as your words, where patriotism is measured in the size of your American flag lapel pin and not in what you do for your country, where "liberal" and "progressive" are equal to terrorist and "compassionate conservatism" trumps all, where American soldiers who fight and bleed and sacrifice and give are told to shut up when they disagree with the President.

And through it all, we sit and watch. Unlike in 1968, we do not protest. We do not fight the transgressions we see around us. We do not march in protest of the travesty of the Iraq War. We don't walk to work to show our anger at the oil companies. We are too busy getting the kids to school, or baseball, or swimming, and we barely have enough time to have a conversation about what is really happening around us, and where America has gone wrong.

We have been bullied for 7 years by people who believe that they are right - not just believe it, but feel it to the very core of their being - and are told that those who do not agree are not just wrong, but immoral, and evil, and unpatriotic, and blinded, and appeasers, and haters. I am hopeful that the people who have led this country for 7 years are given a long and painful kick in the ass in November. I hope those people - who sit in judgement of others while ignoring the plank in their own eyes - will come to see the damage they've done to this country, though I doubt that will ever happen. They are wholly convinced of the righteousness of their cause. Getting them to think another way would be like deprogramming a cult member.

I take solace that it will happen. It is coming. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and judging by the polls out there, I'll bet you are, too. If you like the way things are, vote McCain. If you are ready for America to take a new course, to set sail in a different direction, if you want America to once again be that city on the hill, that beacon of light and guidance to the rest of the world, then protest. Make your voice heard.