Who Do You Look Up To?
By Charles Rush
November 13, 2011
Hebrews 11: 8-12, 2 Samuel 16: 6-7
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.3Mb) ]
was reading an article last year on the moral development of our boys in America and the author pointed out the importance of having role models, of inspirational figures that you could look up to. Who is it that you look up to? It is not a long list is it? It is not nearly long enough.
It got
me to thinking about how important it is to also be a role model for someone,
of becoming a person of enough substance that you can show others the way forward.
We have this wonderful story about young David. There is an enemy warrior in
the land named Goliath. No one can beat him. So the military Jewish people ask
the prophet Samuel to ask God to find them a warrior that can defeat their
enemy so they can live.
The Holy
man prays and asks Jesse to bring his sons. Presumably God has told him that
one of Jesse's sons is the one that can defeat the giant Goliath. So Jesse
brings 6 of his sons, the one's of fighting age, but each passes by the prophet
and the prophet gets no inspiration from any of them, so he asks Jesse if he
has another son. The old man explains that his youngest is just 13 or so and is
at home tending the family herd of sheep. He couldn't possibly be the one.
And
Samuel has this great insight, “God doesn't look simply upon the outer
appearance but upon the heart”. It is not all about strength or skill. It is
also about character. And that is where role models come in. At some point in
our adult life, it is what is inside that really comes to shine.
Most of
the time, I suppose it is not all that obvious when we are young. Most of the
time, we actually grow into our character through the difficult situations we
are forced to overcome in our lives and maybe that is the point.
When
Bobby Kennedy was a child he was nervous in public and shy. He was the third
son and the fourth of seven kids, one of the lost ones in the middle. It is
said that his father so filled all of his children with ambition and
determination that Bobby would do wild, almost reckless things to get his father's
attention. His Dad, apparently, referred to him in the family as ‘the runt'.
He led a
life of privilege on Hyannis, attending Harvard and Harvard Law, and he put his
recklessness to work when he became the Campaign Manager for his brother, John
F. Kennedy, when he ran for the presidency. Let's face it, campaign managers
may be necessary for our world to work, but it is an unlikely place to develop
moral leadership. These are the guys that make deals for their candidate in the
back corridors of power and dig up dirt on their opponents when necessary.
His
brother was elected President and Mr. President promptly appointed his little
brother Attorney General, a job for which he was not really qualified, and
which prompted accusations of nepotism at the time. There he was still a
fighter, less in the background than before, but still so nervous in public
that his leg shook when he spoke. He lived through the first Freedom Riders in
1961 and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in 1962. Though he had
precious little actual contact with Blacks growing up, he embraced the cause
with his brother, the President. President Kennedy said that year that this was
fundamentally a moral issue, probably the first time a president had ever
pronounced race a moral issue. He said it was ‘as old as the scriptures and as
clear as the Constitution'. Like the rest of the country, he began a quick
education into not only the history blacks in our country but also the
appalling conditions that still suffocated their people throughout our country
at that time.
He was
getting an education, getting to know Washington. He was 38,
his wife had recently given birth to their 7th child, when he got a
call from J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI that his brother had been shot in Dallas.
A half hour later, they called back to tell him that President Kennedy was
dead.
I was a
child. If memory serves, schools were dismissed across our country as a sense
of shock settled over our nation. For Bobby, both of his older brothers were
dead. They were more charismatic, more beloved apparently by their father.
It is
hard to say how a death like that affects a man and we can only speculate. But
when your brothers die, no matter what your age, you have this palpable, existential
sense that the bomb landed way too near to you as well. You interiorize it
differently. Grief over their loss is inextricably accompanied by a complicated
personal reflection. Life is short and I am not exempt from tragedy. What am I
doing with my life that makes my survival worthwhile? And really, what should I
be about, not just out of guilt, but what is the point of my being here? What
difference am I making?
And
then, because his brother was such a public figure, at that particular time,
beloved, respected as the President, magnified by the grief and shock of our
nation, it must have poured over him in a pretty profound emotional and
spiritual way.
He went
to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City just a few months after his
brothers death and when he stepped to the podium the crowd began an applause
that ended up lasting for a full 20 minutes as the citizens of our country
expressed their solidarity with him and respect for our dead President. I'm
sure it must have felt like an emotional wave pouring over him.
When he
finally spoke, he said, spoken like a brother. “When I think of President
Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet...
'When
he shall die,
Take him and cut
him out in little stars,
And
he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world
will be in love with night,
And pay no worship
to the garish sun.
His
staffers later said that after his brief speech, he was overwhelmed with sorrow
and stepped out onto the fire escape behind the convention center to be alone.
It is
hard to know how these things change a man but I believe that Bobby Kennedy
went through a spiritual conversion during this time. He never spoke about it,
so this is simply my conjecture. But, he was standing on his own now, not
working for his brother. And even though he was schooled in power, partisan
politics, he acted less and less out of that way of being. And even though he
was raised in privilege, he began to immerse himself in the lives of ordinary
people, and people who were living through hardship.
I
suspect that his personal and family suffering grew his spiritual capacity for
compassion. People who have had to live through deep personal loss have a bond
that they share, an awful bond, but one that can be healing precisely because
it is so expensive, that it cuts right to the heart of what you are all about.
It was a
time in our country when there was a great deal of upheaval that forced our
attention on the plight of deprivation. In 1965, the riots in Watts exposed the
frustration and rage of the ghetto's of Los Angeles,
even as we had similar riots right here in Bedford Stuyvesant. Bobby Kennedy
simply spent more time campaigning in these areas for the Senate than he needed
to, listening to the community leaders describe the
practical effects of racism and poverty as it existed then.
In 1966
the Migrant workers in California had a strike over the working conditions for
Mexican workers, another voice that added a different type of poverty. But in
the backdrop, we were really thinking as Americans about the meaning of Civil
Rights for all our citizens.
Something
in Bobby Kennedy was changing and it was affecting his personal sense of
mission and identity, the difference he was going to make while he was here.
When he was running for President a couple years later, he was down in Southern
Mississippi. He'd stopped along the campaign route to talk to some black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi.
Of
course the press just thought it was a photo op stop. And to
a large extent, probably so did his staff. They were largely composed of
the recent crop of law graduates from Harvard and Yale. Bobby Kennedy was
listening to the sharecroppers and the conversation was going too long. One of
the staffers told him they had to go. Again, they give him the quit sign.
Finally, one of them says, “Senator Kennedy, your people are waiting for you in
New Orleans”. The next event.
Eventually
Kennedy made his way back to the campaign fleet. But before he got in his car,
he gathered the staff and said to them, “You don't understand. These are my
people.” Looking back, who wouldn't be moved by the nobility of those
struggling for the basic dignity that we sought in the Civil Rights movement.
But, I remember once asking my mother why I don't remember our politicians in
the South or our Ministers in the South ever talking about Civil Rights even
though we lived right in the middle of the movement. She looked back at me and
said, “Honey, that's because they never did”.
Bobby
Kennedy was implicitly making Civil Rights and that dignity of every human
person his mission statement. He was forming his identity around this. He was
going to becoming more deeply compassionate with the noble ideals of the
movement. And because of his celebrity family, he had a broad influence.
He was
invited to South Africa to speak at the burgeoning Student Movement that gave
rise to leaders like Steven Biko that would later
challenge apartheid in South Africa. You can imagine that the Afrikaner
government was a little nervous about him visiting. They didn't want him to
stir up demonstrations. They didn't need to be paternalistically lectured to by
Liberal Americans. So there was a lot of tension when he came. At the same
time, there was a tremendous expectation. Students poured out in droves and
packed the hall. It was one of the early times when black students and white
students joined forces together.
So the
place was rapt, when he stepped to the microphone. And this is what he said, “I
came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the
Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at
last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued,
but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined
itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources
through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once
imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former
bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”[i]
There
followed a nervous laughter that grew into a full throated laughter. If
compassion learns by listening first in solidarity with other people's
suffering, leadership learns by identifying with others as broken people on the way, trying to figure this thing out
together. It was very disarming.
It
allowed him to go on and speak of the high ideals that we all share, the hopes
that bind us together. He said, “We must recognize the full human equality of
all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of
government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous,
although it is; not because of the laws of God command it, although they do;
not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and
fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.” And, “Each time a man
stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out
against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each
other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build
a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and
resistance.”[ii]
Probably
because he was so positive, Bobby Kennedy sparked no violent protests when he
was in South Africa but he unquestionably inspired the students to continue
their cause that would lead to the end of apartheid in the next couple decades.
"The hottest places in Hell," Bobby liked to say,
quoting Dante, "are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral
crisis, maintain their neutrality."
"I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people
who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot
and was killed tonight."[iii]
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred
and distrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would
only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a
member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to
make an effort in the United States, we have to make
an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times." "My
favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote. 'Even 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.'"
There were riots in more than 100 cities across America
after King's death. But that night there was calm in Indianapolis
For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome
the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality,
social class, or race-discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and
command of our Constitution. Even as my father grew up in Boston, signs told
him that No Irish Need Apply. Two generations later President Kennedy became
the first Catholic to head the nation; but how many men of ability had, before
1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation's progress
because they were Catholic, or of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or
Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in slums-untaught, unlearned, their
potential lost forever to the nation and human race? Even today, what price
will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro
Americans?
