Where are you, Bobby Kennedy? The Mindless Menace Continues

I was listening to CBC Radio 2 tonight on my way home, and they played Senator Robert Kennedy’s speech, “On the Mindless Menace of Violence,” about the plague of violence that was making the United States sick, in his view. I heard RFK’s speech, and was moved.  The need to respond rose so acutely that I pulled over, and wrote this:

In one decade, visionary humanitarian John Kennedy became president, his brother Bobby Kennedy ran for president on a similar platform of the brotherhood of man, and Martin Luther King told the United States that colour and religion should not be criteria for segregation, but for diversity.

In that decade, all three men were shot dead, crucified in a sense, for their vision.

We in Canada have smugly watched from our cottony soft mantle north of the 49th parallel, our now native ironic detachment from our primary source of cultural product insulating us from a sense that we need to participate in the same social activism. It is true that we are not as violent, that racism and other forms of bigotry, while not necessarily less pervasive, are not manifested by the same bloodshed in Canada. But our complacency is a mistake.

Bobby Kennedy’s speech spoke volumes about our world, today, in Canada equally, four decades later. Guns and swagger are becoming the measure of the man, and not his ability to defuse and resolve conflict, his ability to pacify combatants.

Who will rise above the pettiness of party politics in November and lead the world once again, as the United States did under Roosevelt, Kennedy, and maybe even Clinton? Can Barack Obama’s posturing yield a Kennedy or a King? Can John McCain’s individualism and claimed oath of personal sacrifice place the noble pedestal (and not the tyrannical mace) of the Executive above the Legislature?

They say that our political leanings grow more conservative as we age. I do not see this to be true. I became politically aware after Carter and at the end of Trudeau. My childhood showed the faces of Reagan, Mulroney, and Thatcher. Conservatism was popular, and I grew up believing in it, or at least not despising it in expected adolescent rebellious fashion. As I’ve grown older, I’ve believed in evolution over revolution for society, the slow growth that avoids the backlash from radicalism. I recently learned from an article in the Atlantic that my brand of slow political movement descends from Edmund Burke, the so-called father of modern conservatism (which does not include the recent evangelical manifestation of conversatism we call neo-conservatism). I did not know about Edmund Burke until that article by Jonathan Rauch; I majored in English, not Political Science, and never learned all of the possible labels and brands out there.

But as I said, as I grow older, well into my thirties now – the supposed breeding ground for conservative inclination, I am moving away from the conservatism of the eighties and into a more radical frame of mind.

My question is this: Am I leaning more and more towards the left because I am rebelling against neo-conservatism, and thus confirming my Burkean leaning? Am I leaning more and more towards the left because a man in his thirties should be different from the man he was in his teens?

Or am I leaning more to the left because that’s where our only hope seems to lie for finding another bona fide leader of humanity, another Kennedy, King, Roosevelt, or Lincoln?

I am not just talking about watching the politics to the south. Our North-of-49 smugness is being ventilated by gang bullets and heroin syringes. We can’t afford our ironic detachment anymore. We need leaders too, and we can’t even muster a fraction of the charisma of a McCain, let alone the vibrance of an Obama. How the hell are we ever going to find our own Bobby Kennedy?