January 16, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
They lined up along streets to cry. They had to.
Mandatory mourning was the rule when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il died last January. And those who didn’t attend the organized mourning events, who didn’t cry hard enough or convincingly enough were given sentences in labor camps of at least six months.Mandatory bullying was the rule at the Golden Globes. They had to. It’s their homage to their president.
At the Golden Globes, Julianne Moore reprised her comments from the Emmy’s using her acceptance speech to bash Sarah Palin once again. The actress portrayed Palin in the HBO tele-film "Game Change,” in what is hers and Tina Fey’s chief claim to fame -- imitating the former Alaskan governor.
Giving shouts out to Fey and Katie Couric for "making a significant difference in the 2008 election,” that is by derailing Palin’s vice presidency bid, these were the first words the actress chose to say when winning the award.
If she were a youngster in a soccer game, she would have been given a yellow card for "unsporting behavior” and her Golden Globe statuette would be snatched back and given to a more grateful child. Instead, true to form, the movie’s director declared Moore’s mocking portrayal of Palin as "brave,” applauding Moore’s courage.
In doing so he forgot to mention the bravery of Sen. John McCain who abandoned Palin from the get-go of the campaign and afterwards, and the bravery of McCain’s former advisers, Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, whose biased accounts of Palin were the basis of the HBO movie.
Courage.
One would think courage would be best exemplified by generals who have seen the whites of the enemy’s eyes, such as Gen. David Petraeus or Gen. Colin Powell. These would be men who could provide an example, take responsibility for their actions, look for the best in others, especially one’s own party, not accusing anyone of racism indiscriminately.
Or one would think courage would be best exemplified by the president of our country. Of course not one who would shamelessly exploit children as a physical backdrop to his gun control political agenda, which by-passed Congress and ignored the Constitution.
But there is a place wherein courage resides and every heart recognizes it.
It was five years before Bobby Kennedy spoke publicly about his brother’s death. He never used it for political advantage. He could have.
And when he did speak about it, he did so while addressing a gathering in Indianapolis the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968.
He had been warned about the danger of going into Indianapolis. The mayor of the city did not want him to come to what originally was to be a presidential political rally and Kennedy’s staff certainly did not want him there.
Ethel Kennedy was sent back to the hotel that night by her husband because the senator and those who accompanied him feared the worst.
Many in the crowd that had gathered did not yet know Dr. King had been assassinated. Those who did were angry and armed with knives and guns.
A woman who was at that rally remembers being terrified at the violence that seemed to be imminent. She said the crowd swept her off her feet and carried her along with it.
But when they saw Bobby, a white man standing on the makeshift stage -- the back of a flatbed truck in this inner city -- clad in his brother’s old, tweed overcoat, she said afterwards, "I may not have remembered all his words, but I remembered his courage.”
Documentary footage shows an agitated, angry crowd and apprehensive, tense Kennedy staffers beside him on the platform. ("A Ripple of Hope,” Documentary Directed by Donald Boggs.)
He never spoke any differently to anyone, one of his staff said, whether you were white or black or rich or poor, he spoke to you the same.
And he was right.
Kennedy, speaking without benefit of notes, acknowledged to the crowd that he knew many in the audience were angry, especially since Dr. King was killed by a white man.
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
He understood, but he told them they had a choice to make, between violence and peace. He told them how he had found comfort. He quoted to them the works of the Greek playwright Aeschylus to whom he had turned in his time of despair.
"Even in our sleep,” he said, "pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
At that moment he was not a Democrat or Republican or black or white or rich or poor. And the crowd knew that. They knew he was reaching out his hand to them, sharing with them the grief that he had suffered.
You could see it in their silence, their faces upturned to his.
Indianapolis was one of the cities in which there was no violence that night. Riots erupted in more than 100 U.S. cities, 35 died, 2,500 were injured, but in Indianapolis, the crowd which had gathered to hear Sen. Robert Kennedy dispersed quietly.
In his comments, Kennedy acknowledged the reality of the desperate times in which they were living which included the Vietnam War, the fight for civil rights. And he did not promise that there would ever be a time when the country and its citizens would not be challenged by hard times. But he urged them,
"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
He chose his country over party. And when he visited South Africa, this is what he chose to say:
"I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” (Robert F. Kennedy, University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966)
His pride in his country, his willingness to understand without rancor is the sign of courage. Look for it and you will find it. It only takes one man to begin the Ripple of Hope.
Happy Birthday, Dr. King.
Hold the line, America.