Tom Hayden: Obama and the Open and Unexpected Future

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/07/9495/

Obama and the Open and Unexpected Future
by Tom Hayden



For one who has experienced both eras, the current movement for Barack Obama has achieved a living remembrance of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in the week when RFK’s murder is painfully remembered.

On June 4, 1968, I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision — a movement-driven progressive government — was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.

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My hopes for Robert Kennedy might have been dashed by his subsequent policies if he had lived to be president, but I don’t think so. The best evidence is the progressive course consistently pursued by those closest to him, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, to this day. It is hard to imagine him abandoning all those poor people, fervent anti-war activists, and early environmentalists who swarmed his rallies — and who, like the farmworkers, carried him to victory on the ground in California.

The most impressive parallel between Bobby and Barack is the reappearance of a unified African-American community along with an inspired new generation of activists and voters. Win or lose, the Obama movement will shape progressive politics, and our racial climate, for a generation to come.

Those who denounce Obama — and the possibilities of all electoral politics- - should ponder the effectiveness of sitting judgmentally on the sidelines while an Unexpected Future arrives through the sheer will of a new generation. They should consider whether politics and history can be reduced to a fixed determinism that is endlessly repeated, as if there are no surprises. We can have our differences with Obama’s specific policies, as I certainly do, but those should be measured against the prospect that a movement might transform him even as his very rise continues to transform the rest of us.