From my 2007 essay:
I began my journey towards the Democratic Party in the early morning hours of June 6th, 1968, two weeks before my twenty-first birthday. Although I didn't register as a Democrat until many years later, that morning as I listened to the commentary surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, I began to hear things I had not heard from my Republican family.
I had been married six months, and my husband and I were both in college. We were paying $100 a month for a tiny one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, furnished with some hand-me-down furniture from my parents and a rented refrigerator. Although Bobby Kennedy was shot in the early morning of June 5th, after winning the California primary, because we could afford neither a telephone nor television, I only heard the news of the shooting when I went to class later that morning. And while I hadn't really followed Bobby Kennedy's campaign, I knew immediately that this event had enormous significance to the country.
Robert Kennedy was gunned down just five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated, and just two months after the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. You could not deny the reality that something was terribly wrong in our country. It was a time of war, of civil unrest, and of enormous challenges to the country, and many voices for change were tragically being silenced. So I interrupted my studies, stayed up all night listening to the radio, and got an education I might otherwise never have gotten.
Throughout the night of June 5th, as the young Senator lingered near death, his words, replayed by radio stations around the country, filled my tiny apartment. I heard the words Kennedy used to calm a crowd after Martin Luther King's death, and learned that he promoted private-public partnerships rather than welfare as the most dignified way to bring people out of poverty, that he sympathized with the plight of low paid farm workers in California, that he had a passionate desire to bring about racial justice and to insert a new idealism into the political discourse.
(Read the rest here)
