I usually don’t get too political in this space, but this morning my first update from the New York Times was to say that Clinton and Trump are tied. Utterly horrifying to me, because I’m sure that any success Trump’s enjoying is based on hatred and fear and racism, pretty much the same as Brexit.
Especially in this summer where we’re debating whose lives matter, too many deaths, too many guns, too many people afraid of each other. And remembering the assassinations of 1968. This is kind of silly, but over the weekend people were playing with an app to get a word cloud of their most used words on FB, and mine had the word white in it (probably used in descriptions of white food) so I didn’t want to post my cloud. Thankfully the word cookies was bigger, but still.
My parents were major supporters of JFK; on the morning after his election, I came downstairs to find my mom on the couch, where she’d fallen asleep watching the returns. She was a Democratic party ward chair in Pittsburgh, and active with the League of Women Voters, and I remember going with her to see how to work the voting machines. My father gave a speech at something called Jews for Kennedy, trying to quell the fears of what a Catholic in the White House would do – seems quaint at this point. And the only time in my life that I ever saw my dad cry was when we watched Kennedy’s funeral on TV. When the rider-less horse went by he bent over and sobbed.
When I a kid, I had the famous quote from John Kennedy’s inaugural, “Ask not what your country can do for you …” hand written, in my childish hand, on yellow lined paper, taped up over my desk. For this election year, I want to change it to this one, from RFK in April 1964, in a speech he gave after Martin Luther King was killed.
From Bobby Kennedy: the making of a liberal icon, by Larry Tye, quoted in NYT book review, Sunday July 10, 2016