Watching the film clips about the Kennedys was like re-living my life. I came of age in the 60's when the world was changing in all kinds of wonderful ways--racial barriers breaking down, patriarchy challenged, opportunities opening for women. The Kennedys were sometimes given credit for the incredible sense of possibility of those days, but the Kennedy brothers were responding to something bubbling up from the ground.
Life was not kind to us 60's activists. As we entered our middle years with all the inevitable personal disappointments (marriages failing, career goals unrealized), we also had to deal with all those dreams from the 60's crashing down. The long backlash against the 60's which began with Nixon turned into a full scale assault with the election of Ronald Reagan, followed by all the disappointments and missed opportunities of the Clinton years and then the eight year horror of George W Bush .
But Ted Kennedy kept fighting the good fight through it all. As the years passed, I grew to respect and value him more and more. His last gift to us was his early support for Barack Obama, who may not have win the primary without it.
I never thought I would live long enough to see the election of an African- American president. I was an early Obama. supporter, although I didn't come out of the closet until after Iowa. (As a NOW chapter president it was little dicey.) Ted Kennedy and Carolyn Kennedy's early support gave me (and no doubt many others) hope that Obama could make it.
With Obama's election, I experienced for the first time in many long years that sense of social possibility I had not felt since the 60's. (Granted that optimism is tempered by the enormity of the problems Obama inherited.)
And that sense of social possibility includes gender equality as well as racial equality. Watching all those film clips of Jacqueline Kennedy, I could not help but think of the dramatic contrast with Michelle Obama. Jacqueline Kennedy was beautiful in an almost unreal fashion model sense, but a deferential wife with her wispy little girl voice, silently enduring her husband's serial philandering. Michelle Obama is beautiful in a strong, athletic real woman sense, a Harvard trained lawyer with a confident voice, in a marriage which is clearly a loving partnership.
We have come a really long way. The long backlash against the 60's appears to be finally over. Sure we have the crazy birthers and the tea-baggers. There are enough of them to create a lot of noise, but not enough to muster an electoral majority.
There is so much work to be done. It's tragic that that Kennedy did not live long enough to see national health care passed. Let's hope that his memory inspires others.
Karen Bojar
http://www.the-next-stage.com/
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I am a child of the eighties, so I grew up (though I couldn't put words to it at the time) basking in the dying embers of the sixties and all it represented. A new conservative philosophy and a renewed commitment that the business of America was business had taken hold and my father was a proponent of the Reagan, shining city on a hill dream.
To mirror what you've said, most of my friends' parents got divorced and when I got a little older I realized that most of them had a secret pseudo-hippie past that had long since been exchanged for the propriety of the business suit.
But underneath it all, I acknowledge that there were changes made for the better. The eighties weren't all a complete rejection of what had come before it. Nor are these times. But sometimes hindsight gives us a perspective that the pace of day to day living does not. Sometimes we have to take a step back and in doing so, challenge our mode of thinking to see it, but it is there. And we will continue to make progress, which might seem maddeningly slow at the time, but will be part of the turtle's pace that is typical of that long moral arc that bends towards justice.
I wish that the sixties would have had more of an impact than what they did. I mean America tends to make one small step forward and ten thousand giant leaps back. We have stalled progress on anything since then, it saddens me.
Wait, how exactly is Michelle Obama a step forward from Jacqueline Kennedy? When she moved into the White House Jackie put in furniture and decorations; Michelle put in an organic garden. Jackie also had a career that she set aside to be a politician's wife (she returned to writing and editing as a widow). It is true that unlike Michelle, Jackie had little use for athletics--she thought the Kennedy family was muscle-headed, and she used cigarettes to keep thin--but I don't think a different opinion on this issue makes a "dramatic contrast."