To Finish a Dream

At Real History blog, Lisa speaks of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign as a kind of quest to finish the dream that the late Sen. Bobby Kennedy started. Like Barack, Bobby, too, wanted to end a war (the Vietnam war in his time), end the mindset of continual war and only go to war as a last resort. Like Barack, Bobby wanted to take funding being used to purchase planes and ships and tanks, to bomb homes and village and redirect those sources to much-needed projects at homes: providing health care for more, improving education, reducing homelessness, ending poverty, and healing racial wounds.

Neither the death of brother, John Kennedy, or his friend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., destroyed his basic belief in Americans or his optimism about life. When Dr. King was assassinated, Bobby was speaking to a predominantly black audience in Indianapolis, Indiana. Police advised that he not go there. They thought it was too dangerous, that it was crime-ridden ghetto area. Bobby insisted. When he heard the news on the radio, he felt compelled to tell the audience and this is what he said:

"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, 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." 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 or lawlessness; but 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 they be black."

Bobby's quest to achieve these goals was stopped when he was felled by an assassin's bullet in the kitchen of a California hotel and Republican Richard Nixon became president in 1968. But Barack's quest continues. On Tuesday, he received the number of delegates to make him the democratic nominee for president of the United States, the first African American to do so in U.S. history.

Can Barack help this nation to gain the compassion and wisdom to transcend racism, sexism, and homophobia and move this country to end a mistaken war and transfer monies used for that war to improve the lives of Americans here at home? Obama says he can. He's an optimist. Here's what he said to that crowd of 17,000 in St. Paul on Tuesday night:

"I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals."

Can Barack Obama finish the dream that Bobby started?