The Perfect Moment

The perfect time

Two million infected with coronavirus, over one hundred thousand dead, 38 million unemployed, rampant rioting, vandalism and destruction in almost all cities in the US. The almost impossible to watch, nine minute long death of George Floyd coming live into our homes set the country on fire. Fear, uncertainty, watching the country go up in flames, no compass, no leaders, makes you want to take the law into your own hands, get your gun and start shooting .

The perfect time to do what needs to be done.

When Mandela and de Klerk decided to put an end to apartheid in South Africa they realized this was possible only if they faced their demons together. No good would come by sweeping the past under the rug. They convened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged to bring out the skeletons from the closet, the only way to build a democratic country with racial equality and peace. It is now time to do the same in the US. No government since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 has done anything like that. Trump can send in the National Guard and shoot a lot of thugs but it is like giving an aspirin so someone with a head tumor. You ease the pain, for a while, but you really don’t fix anything.

There is need for a leader. A man, or a woman, who can stand on a flatbed truck like Robert F. Kenendy did and without a written speech speak form the heart:

“For those of you who are black you can be filled with bitterness and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -black people amongst black people and white people amongst white people- filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort to understand and to comprehend and replace that violence, that stain that has spread across our land with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

We have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to go beyond and go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon our heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God”.

We can do well in this country. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land”

RFK gave this speech in Indianapolis on April 4, 1964, the day Martin Luther King was murdered. Indianapolis was the only city to avoid the riots of 1968.

RFK would be killed 63 days later