The night I became a Democrat

On this, the fortieth anniversary of the death of Bobby Kennedy, I remember the night I became a Democrat:

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)

Some things aren't funny

Yesterday, while speaking to the NRA, former Arkansas Governor and recent Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said this after hearing a loud noise offstage:

That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak. Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.

The liberal blogs are understandably outraged. To joke about anyone aiming a gun at a presidential candidate is not only bad taste, it's the kind of thing that would get you arrested at a campaign rally if you were just an ordinary citizen.

At this moment there are men surrounding Obama who have sworn to give their lives to protect him. We pay their salaries because we think it is that important to our democracy to keep our candidates from being eliminated before the ballots are even cast.

How sad that in this once enlightened country we have to do that. How sad that we do not feel so privileged, so grateful to have inherted this democracy from our ancestors that violence against a candidate, or even joking about violence against a candidate, would never happen here.

I don't know what was in the mind of Mike Huckabee. Not much, it seems, because he sure didn't give that comment much thought. Whether or not it reveals something more fundamentally flawed about this man I can't say.

But if you add this joke to the words of one person in West Virginia who, according to the Washington Post, said of Obama "hang that darky from a tree," you realize we still have serious racial problems in this country.

There are so many things to condemn about what Huckabee said. I suppose if he was out hunting with Dick Cheney and heard a loud noise and said that was Cheney shooting and everybody ducked you might be able to consider it funny, though I don't think many of us would.

But to joke about the presumptive Democratic nominee, when many of us still remember the Kennedys, the Democratic president and Democratic presidential candidate, who were assassinated in our lifetimes, is reprehensible. And when the nominee also happens to be black, when so many black leaders were assassinated in their fight for civil rights, the "joke" is beyond tasteless. It is dangerous.

I don't think Mike Huckabee is a bad person. I think he is a smart, funny, and well meaning individual. And I would imagine he deeply regrets his comments and will apologize for them. But the fact that someone this accomplished, who was recently prominent on the national stage, could be so clueless, so insensitive, and so capable of allowing something like this to come out of his mouth, tells me we still have a very long way to go in this country to overcome our inclinations to violence as well as racism.

Some things simply aren't funny. Aiming a gun at someone, and a political candidate being in fear of assassination are two of those things.