Fifty years ago today hope died.  After MLK was assassinated it was on life support and on June 6, 1968 it died.

I remember waking up that day.  My parents were acting weird, out of sorts.  I didn’t really know why.  They didn’t talk about it, didn’t say.  And in school that morning there was an announcement that Bobby Kennedy was dead.  I was only seven years old.  I didn’t really know what it meant then.  But now, like others, I wonder what could have been.  I read recently (I don’t remember where, sorry that I can’t cite it) that the real losses in the 60’s were Bobby and Malcolm, not Jack and Martin.  We knew what JFK and MLK were.  They were fully formed.  We never got to know what RFK and MX could be.  They died to soon.  On 1968/06/06 hope died.

Yeah, there is still hope.  We resist, try to believe, fight on.  Yet sometimes that is hard to do.  So many times hope has been killed, usually with the bullets of an assassin.  Yet these words still guide me, they are perhaps the most powerful I’ve heard.  They are the epitome of the dream in our Declaration of Independence, of what our Constitution was founded to create.  They are words that Ted spoke at the funeral:

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” – Robert F. Kennedy

Is the dream really dead?  I refuse to believe it is.

Resist