Street Level

How to know you’re really old: You read that Ted Kennedy has probably a year at best to live — and you cry.

Most of my co-workers probably don’t even know who he is.

Bobby? JFK?

Get out the history books.

I remember a co-worker many years ago who, when hearing some of us discussing Richard Nixon, complained that “some hearing” kept interrupting her favourite cartoon shows.

Some hearing. Watergate.

I should be this old.

But to know that Teddy has an inoperable, malignant brain tumour is somehow like finally nearing the end of a favourite book. You know the story. You’ve read it over and over again, never daring to finish that final chapter because, once you do, the story is done.

This is the Kennedy family to me.

As a child, I had a life-size poster of Bobby Kennedy hanging on my bedroom wall.

I had smaller ones of John, not because he was lesser in stature — after all, he was the president while Bobby was the senator/attorney-general/presidential wannabe — but because, for some reason, I always identified more with Bobby.

He was the one behind the headline maker. He was the one who cleaned up his big brother’s messes.

He was the one who many of us back then thought could truly fulfil the promise his big brother’s presidency began with, the promise that ended in one shot.

And, lest those of you 50-plus think the memory of Chappaquiddick is missing from my history vault, it’s not.

Teddy did wrong and got away with it, likely more because of his family’s name and the demands that placed upon him than anything else.

I’d like to think he learned from it and strengthened his resolve to do right. Who knows? Maybe he stayed a philanderer even to these days.

Hopefully, he didn’t.

That’s the key to those of us who are 50-plus, who lived through those years — hope, and how we lost it.

We remember where we were when the radio announcer interrupted some stupid disco song to announce JFK had been shot dead.

That Bobby had died on the floor of a hotel kitchen.

That Martin had been killed outside his motel room.

I was in elementary school for each of these announcements, yet still felt their gravity to my world.

Such was the lessons I learned at an early age at my parents’ knees — we are in this world to do good and, back then, the Kennedys and their friends did good.

I was blessed to meet Cesar Chavez at the height of the farmworkers’ boycott in the 1970s. One of my bosses at the paper I spent most of my life working gave me proper hell for going out on an assignment wearing a “Nixon eats lettuce” pin.

Those were good days. They are days our children will never experience. They’re growing up in a time of American Idol and Grand Theft Auto 4, of no one who really qualifies as a true hero, someone to look up to.

Name one person today who could fill that role. There are none on the Canadian national scene. My own bias would have me name Stephen Lewis but, even then, how many born after 1970 know of his many incomparable accomplishments?

It’s sad this is the legacy we’re leaving our children.

I feel dismay that, when my children are in their 50s, they won’t ever find themselves sitting in their homes grieving because someone they always thought was larger than life — who wanted to and many times did change the world we live in — was facing his own demise.

Because, behind all that grief is the realization that we, the often-maligned, much written about, baby boomers were privy to some incredible moments in the history of this world.

It’s too bad that, at the time, we didn’t realize it.

It’s only now, as these moments become pages in history books, that their true value becomes evident.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

Posted by Dale at 7:17 a.m. Comments