45 years after RFK died, still poverty, plenty and a call to justice [View all]

[mmonk]

Forty-five years after Robert Kennedy’s 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 assassin’s 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 brother’s 1960 presidential campaign.

-snip-

Kennedy’s 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 he’d known. And he came to believe that their children were to be as well-treasured as his own.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

I ask to be forgiven if, on this single day, in my mind’s 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