North Carolina
Related: About this forum45 years after RFK died, still poverty, plenty and a call to justice
Forty-five years after Robert Kennedys death, Gov. Pat McCrory and our General Assembly overtly wage war against poor North Carolinians boasting of a new regime of cruelty and heightened inequality.
Robert Francis Kennedy died 45 years ago today. An assassins bullet ended one of the most astonishing presidential campaigns in American history. Kennedy was complex. The politician of 1967 and 1968 was not the pugilistic and strategic figure of the McCarthy hearings, the Teamster investigations and his brothers 1960 presidential campaign.
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Kennedys campaign, stunningly, focused on the long neglected byways of the nation. He embraced black kids with distended stomachs in the Mississippi Delta. He highlighted suicide rates on Indian reservations. He marched with Latino farmworkers in California and fought the desperation of Appalachian miners left without the dignity of work. He became a singular voice for the excluded. He behaved as if their futures counted as much as those of the power brokers hed known. And he came to believe that their children were to be as well-treasured as his own.
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Kennedy made the poorest among us his highest priority. Our governor and General Assembly overtly wage war against poor and low-income North Carolinians boasting of a new regime of cruelty and heightened inequality.
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It is brutal to state, but we currently govern only for the wealthy, only for the white, only for the Christian, only for the straight, only for the male and only for the adherents of an extremist political ideology that rejects the foundational tenets of American constitutional democracy.
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I ask to be forgiven if, on this single day, in my minds eye, I see a silhouette of Robert Francis Kennedy straining to keep his balance on the back of a moving car shoulders sloping, eyes shining, hair disheveled, cufflinks torn from his wrists. Part of me still reaches for his hand.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/06/05/2941388/45-years-after-rfk-died-still.html#storylink=cpy
life long demo
(1,113 posts)If I may add this from the article:
Kennedys call was to justice not to charity. Our whole nation is degraded by wrenching poverty amid astonishing plenty. Those born under the most comfortable conditions have a responsibility to others less well off. A society of infinite possibility cannot accommodate itself to yawning inequality and deprivation. To do so ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. For he who diminishes the outcast and the stranger also denies America.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/06/05/2941388/45-years-after-rfk-died-still.html#storylink=cpy
What we lost on that day was immeasurable.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)Lifelong Protester
(8,421 posts)I keep reaching for his hand too, and just can't help but feel this country would be in a better place had he lived.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)What this country needs is complete campaign finance reform so that our representatives legislate for the people , not for their wealthy donors.