Bob Herbert on the Kennedys: Follow The Fellow Who Follows A Dream
On the day I was born, said my father, said he
"I've an an elegant legacy waitin' for ye.
'Tis a rhyme for your lips and a song for your heart
To sing it whenever the world falls apart. "
Look, look, look to the rainbow
Follow it over the hill and the stream
Look, look, look to the rainbow
Follow the fellow who follows a dream.
For those of you who are younger, who may not quite get exactly what the Kennedys meant to us, this lovely piece from Bob Herbert explains it well - they made us feel better than we were, and made us want to be better people. He suggests that their theme song, rather than "Camelot," should instead be "Follow the Rainbow" from "Finian's Rainbow":
The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”
Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.
“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.
“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”
That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.
We have to be better, do better and ,ake our world better.
We cannot stoop to the bitterness and hate, the intolerance of even the worst of us is still intolerance.
There is a better tomorrow. In 1967 we, as a country decided to allow mixed race marriage. That was a big step.
We have moved forward and will continue to do so if we can keep from letting anyone or anything make us take two steps back for every one forward.
The loons are losing - we just have to persevere.
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
"It is not given to us to right every wrong, to make perfect all the imperfections of the world. But neither is it given to us to sit content in our storehouses dieting while others starve, buying 8 million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. We are simply not doing enough.
Robert F. Kennedy, July 21, 1966
Unlike any political leader I have known in my lifetime, RFK had a sincere and genuine empathy for the dispossessed in our society---something that resonated with most all that he connected with. With the passing of time, I now recognize how unique and extraordinary this ability was. Paul Wellstone and Teddy came closest to emulating it, but there have been no others just like him.
And that is truly the tragedy of losing him too soon. Nevertheless, it is imperative that those among us who believe and care about his life's work carry it forward in the best way we can.
"We will find fulfillment not in the goods that we have, but in the good we can do for each other."
Robert F. Kennedy
RIP Ted Kennedy. Your contributions would have made your brothers proud.
This is not my father's America
Health for life to you,
A wife of your choice to you,
Land without rent to you,
A child every year to you,
And the light of Heaven
after this world for you.
Do you see this as touching Irish sentimentality, or as an exploitation of sentimentality and religious belief to promote a socialist agenda? Most people will see it the first way, but a group with a growing voice (but not growing number) are seeing it as the other.
They might be doing this because they're woefully misinformed, and may refuse to hear the counterargument. They might intentionally be tricking others into thinking that this is a socialist poem in order to further their own pursuits. They might even be crazy enough to believe this. Regardless, the outcome is that they are a group of people who don't budge from their positions because they feel as though they are the last bulwark against a socialist take-over of the West. Through their self-imposed culture of fear, they see ghosts and monsters in everything they see, especially anything that [the Enemy/the Other/the Left] does or represents. As the Right continue their march further to the right, they are stretching the country.
People truly are too polarized right now, and it's causing lasting damage to everyone. Yet, the Right are happy to keep pulling the country further in one direction regardless of what everyone else thinks. They're playing a game of chicken with the Left, hoping that they move right just to keep the country from breaking, or that they shoot to the left and get blamed for tearing the country in half. Something will happen, and it probably won't be pretty.
This is why it's so important to make sure we're doing the right thing before it gets started. The fight for rights and freedoms not for political capital but for the benefit of your fellow man should be a sign. Seeing a man live his life in pursuit of the well-being of others he may never even meet. In essence, seeing the poem for what it is and not what we infer it to be.
So, let's not get bogged down in semantics. We've got a country to heal, and there's no time like the present. RIP Ted Kennedy, hopefully that rainbow you saw others will see too.
The main things I found inspiring and most admirable in the Kennedy family, all of them, is they kept their vision of a better world. A better society. A more equal world. It wasn't a matter of political expedience. It was, and is, a major thread of their fabric. It never changed.
Elections, trends nor powerful adversaries could sway their belief that they could influence the forces within government and a struggling society to make things better for all of us. The poor, the neglected and the disadvantaged owe the Kennedy family much, for they never stopped reaching for a just world. And the rest owe them praise and respect for keeping our dreams alive, through it all. They have steadfastly remained Titans in difficult times in spite of terrible losses.
What a great observation. Indeed, "Camelot" was more about the dreams and struggles of kings and nobles, and our frailties as humans which affect larger events. "Finian's Rainbow" was about class struggle: sharecroppers against the greedy land/business owners in the US with two love stories including a leprechaun thrown in the mix. Plus a wonderful song book (my favorite being "When the Idle Poor, Become the Idle Rich", a pointed social comment on how certain behavior is OK if you are rich, but NOT if you are poor.)
The Republican right has always viewed the Kennedys as betrayers of their class, just as FDR was considered in his time.
We will all miss Teddy. But let's not view his death as the end of an era, but as the beginning of a new one. It doesn't need to be a Kennedy who will hold the torch; it can be all of us.
Through all of the TV coverage I watched I kept thinking Dignity & Grace. Rose Kennedy taught her children to devote their lives to public service & they have. Not necessarily politics but some sort of public service. As I watched his funeral & the younger Kennedys spoke it appeared that they have been taught the same. Speak well & behave with dignity & grace. It will be interesting to see to what form of public service they aspire.
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