I Miss You, Bobby!

Published on Monday, February 19, 2007 by the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune (Minnesota)
What We Can Learn from Heroes Like Bobby Kennedy

A screening of the movie "Bobby" opened the eyes and hearts of another generation to a time when politics was filled with hope.

by Heather Scheiwe

Did anyone actually see "Bobby"? In the midst of Oscar buzz, there's little more than a whisper about the film. The critics were, well, critical of the movie for not digging deeper into the character of Robert F. Kennedy, the man my 60-year-old friend called "the last politician who gave me hope." But the cinematic story behind the fateful events at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel (where presidential hopeful Kennedy was shot on June 4, 1968) provoked a powerful conversation between my friend and me.

I'm 24. I'm new at this political thing, trying to absorb the current scene like a saturated sponge sweeping across a greasy stove. There's so much, and not much that seems real. And if anything, my generation longs for authenticity.

This is why I was so drawn to my older friend, who had proudly marched in demonstrations, fought for equality in education, and even started a grass-roots women's advocacy organization.

She didn't just bemoan the mistakes of the day.

She did stuff, and believed that doing stuff could change the world, in part because Bobby told her it could. His visits throughout the nation -- from rural Mississippi towns to inner-city hovels--had unveiled civil injustices, organized crime, and the national poverty crisis, opening the eyes and hearts of a young generation.

Yet after the tragic assassinations of the 1960s -- John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby in 1968 -- my friend bowed out of the political scene altogether. Nearly 40 years apart in age, we were sharing a bench on the cynics' sideline.

So I took her to "Bobby." It was already at the $2 theater. We were the only ones there. Which is good, because we cried. A lot. With the beat of Motown music in the background, the characters highlighted nearly every sociopolitical issue of that day: women's rights, racial segregation, drugs, the draft, beauty, adultery, love, divorce, passion. Interspersed throughout the fictional script, clips of Bobby's speeches narrated actual newsreels of his tours. But the film wasn't really about Robert F. Kennedy, or politics, or even the "radical" 1960s. It was about people, something politics seems to have lost amid the hanging chads and red/blue polarity of modern elections.

We sat in the theater for nearly an hour after the final credits. Accounts of past marches and speeches burst from her like the ratatat tat of a typewriter under inspired fingers. She wept for Bobby, for the lost soul of politics, and for my generation, a generation that seems to face a world without heroes. I cried, too, but not for lack of hope. Hope was sitting next to me.
A few days and a barrage of her enthusiastic e-mails later, she gave me a book: "Profiles in Courage," by Bobby's older brother John Kennedy. If you're 35 or older, you might know about this book, but in all my college liberal arts classes, I had never heard of it. Within these pages are men (JFK didn't highlight any women, even with wife Jackie's help) who cared something about people, about undiluted values, about how to move forward as a nation.

As much as we appreciate alternative media, twentysomethings cannot depend solely on YouTube and Steven Colbert to activate our political involvement. Our cynicism may be well-founded, but we should not discount the predigital past and those who pounded the pavement before gel soles cushioned their steps.

If we listen to them and, more importantly, learn from what they did, we might find out that hope isn't so audacious after all.

Heather Scheiwe is founder and managing editor of Alive Magazine, a national alternative literary arts magazine created and published entirely by women age 25 and younger. She lives in Minneapolis.


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