Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, brother and alter ego of the martyred JFK, knew something terrible when he ran for president in 1968. Somewhere along his 82-day campaign, picking up on the social turbulence of a painfully divided nation, a nation incited by hateful talk and racism, Bobby declared, “There are guns between me and the White House.”
Kennedy was murdered just after winning the California Democratic primary on June 4, 1968. He was 42. The Republican Party, standing on the dark foundation of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” (racial polarization, xenophobia, military stridency) hijacked the election that Kennedy would have likely won.
Now it’s 2016. David Remnick of The New Yorker put it brilliantly about Donald Trump, the magnate and loath-baiting successor to 1968: he is “the beneficiary of a long process of Republican intellectual decadence.” Trump actually tempts people into acting out their seething hate—and downplays the violence he is now fomenting. On Monday night, CNN reported that a county sheriff in North Carolina was opening an investigation about Trump inciting mob violence at his rallies. Woe to our land.
I fearfully believe that there will be gunfire between now and the election. In this impossibly-armed country, it’s hardly a leap from bullying to bullets. If Trump is the victim of such a thing, I will mourn for our nation like any person should. But he will have succeeded in forcing himself on us in the most ultimate fashion and this too is cosmically depressing.
So many people tell me that they never recall such a nadir in our electoral history. They expect anything and are disappointed with everything. Cynicism pervades the ballot process; the ethics of our grandparents and the sacrifices of our World War II veterans are corrupted with short-hand truculence and zero idealism. We have way slid down from John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream.
This sullenness is rampant—the anguished talk, the expressions of dismay, the bursts of despair, the downright embarrassment about the state of politics in our nation. Some folks even declare their cascading shame in being American. And it’s more than about this bombastic, mercantile candidate who has purchased and strong-armed his way into the center. The whole dynamic is egregiously mediocre, spiritually devastating, and painfully devoid of dignity. And it now invites brutality. The “debates,” which more resemble day-time talk shows, are a series of burlesque disasters. The rallies are become more like dangerous crowds.
No more endorsement strategies, please. I’m looking for a President who endorses the greatest experiment in democracy ever seen on the planet. I’m looking to be moved, not repelled. As Bobby Kennedy rephrased George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things; and say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”