I spent my day in the halls of power listening to and sharing cheese cubes with those who have run for President and those who aspire to. I heard friends, family, colleages and admirers of the late Robert Kennedy mark what would have been his 80th birthday with a day of events on Capitol Hill remembering this great man and his legacy. Important men and women from nearly every continent gathered to pay him tribute. Important figures of blue-state America such as Sen. Kerry, Sen. Clinton, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Sen. Obama, Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Kucinich, Tom Hayden, Harry Belafonte, and many, many more came out to speak to me and many others about the legacy of Robert Kennedy.

They spoke glowingly of this man’s short career of defending the powerless and speaking up for those without a voice and more importantly helping them find their own voice. I listened as many wondered out loud what Sen. Robert Kennedy would say about the world today had he not met his untimely death that night in Los Angeles.

I wonder that myself.

While I can’t claim to know the man personally as so many who rose today, I share their belief that Kennedy would be ashamed. Ashamed not just in this Administration as the speakers reminded us time and time again, but ashamed in his friends & supporters who claim to keep his legacy alive today.

While I risk never again receiving an invite to an elite gathering of this nature in the future, I think I do a greater honor to Robert Kennedy’s legacy by refusing to be silent in the face of injustice and speaking plainly by calling a wrong a wrong. To keep silent would add a further wrong to his memory, and there has been enough of that today.

Today in the US Capitol Building I listened with interest to a panel discussion on RFK and his legacy. The last speaker was Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel who, as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responsible for getting more Democrats elected to Congress in 2006, articulated his path for moving Kennedy’s vision forward into the future of America’s politics. He was a charming guy who spoke of many agreeable things until his final remark.

He brought up the need to articulate Democratic values (big D, mind you), like many pundits and politicians he no doubt feels there is a “values gap” between Republicans and Democrats and feels a need for the Democratic Party to better articulate its’ values to confront the Republican’s use of values to sweep elections.

No doubt envious of Republican’s success using anti-gay values to produce electoral victories, Rep. Emanuel has pinned his parties’ hopes purely on anti-youth values.

He outlined an agenda of school uniforms, curfews, and V-Chip powered censorship as examples of these new “values.” If these are the new values of the Democratic Party, then this is not Robert Kennedy’s party. Perhaps it never was.

Former Kennedy aide and CNN anchor Jeff Greenfield summed up Kennedy’s values as “remove your boot from that person’s neck.” The V-Chip, curfew laws, and school uniforms apply that boot firmly on the neck of America’s youth and all Americans concerned with justice and equality should be ashamed.

Sitting there listening to these words and this oppressive “vision” I was much more than ashamed. I was mad. I quickly rose to my feet and walked to the microphone. As Martin Luther King noted, “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” I rose to make my demand; I rose to speak truth to power.

Passionate though bumbling I referenced Robert F. Kennedy’s work to stick up for the downtrodden and the powerless, and said as best I could at the moment that ‘values’ of criminalizing youth and punishing them based on a stereotype that sees them as hoodlums and criminals does not stick up for the powerless, it further strips them of power. Rep. Emanuel responded with a defense of school uniforms claiming they have reduced crime to which the entire room applauded.

They applauded twice.

Lacking the eloquence I might have mustered were I a great man like Dr. King or Sen. Kennedy, or if I weren’t simply pissed off at the moment, I failed to articulate my objection quite as clearly as was needed, so instead I will attempt to do so here for obviously there are many out there who need to hear it. Many out there whose quotations of RFK are made hollow and meaningless by cheering on those who firmly place their boot on the neck of the oppressed.

Speaking to students at the University of Cape town in South Africa in 1966, Sen. Robert Kennedy said this:

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person’s benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech; the right to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of field and forest; the right to recall governments to their duties and obligations; above all, the right to affirm one’s membership and allegiance to the body politic — to society — to the men with whom we share our land, our heritage and our children’s future.

How does a school uniform protect the right to express and communicate ideas? How does arresting youth for simply walking down the street at night protect individual liberty? How does the V-chip protect free speech? No, Rep. Emanuel these are not elements of just values or a just vision, these are not elements of any vision that any honorable man can claim to represent Sen. Kennedy and all he stood for. These policies of silencing students and arresting the young have no place in a just society.

What is liberty if it does not include the right to wake up in the morning and decide what clothes you wear? What is justice if it allows for arresting those of a certain class for doing no harm greater than choosing to leave their house at night? What is freedom if it does not include the right to watch what one pleases on TV? To speak of freedom and to speak of social justice while applauding oppressive policies designed to strip away those very ideals from our largest remaining disenfranchised minority is the height of hypocrisy and I refuse to be silent about it.

If this is to be the new vision of the Democratic Party then this is a party that has lost its way. Rep. Emanuel claims these policies protect youth, but I say that protecting those who do not wish or need to be protected is not a charitable act, it is an act of violence. It is a bastardization of our basic notions of liberty and equality. It is an embracing of the politics of division, a strategy rooted in bigotry and negative stereotypes. Though as a cynical tactic I must give them credit, they have found a genius scheme. What political costs are involved in betraying a minority who cannot vote? More importantly, what costs are there in betraying a minority so burdened with internalized oppression and lacking necessary class consciousness that when that right to vote is finally granted, they will no longer care or fight to rectify wrongs visited upon them in the past? No costs. Not yet at least. It is up to us then to make those costs real and to make them felt in the halls of the powerful that applaud and cheer for a further stripping of our rights.

It is up to us to continually challenge those in power and demand they listen to our demands. It is our duty to refuse to be silent. It is our duty to speak out to those who ignore us. It is our duty to stand up and be heard no matter the issue, no matter the audience, no matter the location. With a thousand voices and a thousand pin pricks we will slay this dragon of ageism.

That is the true way to pay tribute to and remember the great Robert F. Kennedy and to make real his message of hope and freedom and not make it hollow with hypocrisy. At that same speech in South Africa, Robert Kennedy said, “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. 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.”

I call to you now, send forth that ripple. Refuse to be silent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Youth Rights, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.