Robert F. Kennedy believed in hope, peace, social justice and collective action to create a better world, and in everyone playing a part. He said that the answer is to rely on youth, meaning as a state of youthful mind, spirit, creativity, courage and “the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.” We cannot change the future with the dogmas and slogans of the past.

Today’s generation has responsibility to future generations and we cannot afford to shrink from it believing that one person cannot make a difference. As Bobby said, many of the world’s greatest changes resulted from the actions of a single individual like 17-year old Saint Joan of Arc who saved France; or Christopher Columbus who discovered the New World, or 32 year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that “all men are created equal.”

RFK said, “Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged, and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that event.”

The future does not belong to the ill-informed, the apathetic, the distracted or disinterested–but to those who “can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society. Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.”

On June 8th, 1968, Senator Ted Kennedy gave his brother Bobby’s eulogy in Saint Patrick’s Church in NYC stating that his brother need only to be remembered as a good and decent man, who “saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” All of us are capable in our own way of that kind of legacy, to look around and see what we can do.

This article may be reprinted unchanged and in its entirety including the resource box. Suzanne de Cornelia 2008, all copyrights apply.
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