Could RFK + MLK = Barack? or maybe BaRacK?
I don’t know who first made the analogy between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, but the analogy doesn’t work for me. Obama himself admits he isn’t old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and Obama is no John Kennedy. However, after what I saw yesterday in Nebraska, I have concluded Obama isn’t less than JFK; I think he may be more. I think Obama may be the sum of two dreams, the Kennedy dream and the King dream and, more importantly, I think the Obama movement may finally be the movement that can unite multiple sets of dreamers.
I am suggesting, if I may be so bold, that Obama = RFK + MLK. Because after what I have seen in Nebraska this past week, I am reminded not of 1960, when I was only 12, but of 1968, when I turned 20. And since 1968, until last week, I had not seen or heard or felt or known the press of the crowd, the smiles and laughter that can only come from hope, the feeling of being in an enormous family of the human race, finally united with one voice, a voice of peace and of justice — I had not again been in the realm of a sense that “yes, the time is now,” since 1968, until last week.
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Being only 20 in 1968, I was not yet old enough to vote. But I was old enough to campaign, old enough to protest the war, old enough to work for civil rights, old enough to see men I knew go to Vietnam and come back crippled in body and, as we soon saw, even more crippled in mind and spirit.
I was old enough to have heard Martin Luther King speak at my college in 1967, the only time he ever appeared on stage with Black militant Stokely Carmichael. Read the rest of this entry »