By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — It’s painful to compare the presidential candidates of 2016 to, say, those who sought the office in 1968—when my generation was living through both the gallant civil rights movement and the ghastly war in Vietnam. This lament applies to leadership figures in general—they are dwarfed against the largeness and danger of this disconcerting and frightening era.
In 1968, we endured the additional unbearable assassinations, the grisly race riots, the stirring space adventures. We were emoting, not trending. We experienced a national cataclysm, from war to Woodstock, from anarchy to acid, from the urban madness to the Miracle Mets. Men ran for president (and one died while doing so) who seemed as large as the nation was chaotic.
This lineup we have now of men and women is as uninspiring as the nation is churning. They are so small that most of them only have first names (Jeb, Hillary, Carly)—a maddening, media-driven deflation in the once solemn realm of national politics.
Ben Carson? Methinks the Bible he thumps is more believable than the apocryphal narratives of his life he sells. Jeb Bush? Looks like he’d rather have his knees drained than be out there campaigning. Donald Trump? Chris Christie? Better he should audition for the cinematic version of The Sopranos. Carly Fiorina? Gets revved up about video footage that you can’t find on Redbox. Rand Paul? Haircut needed—along with a plan. Mike Huckabee? Good after-dinner speaker; looks like he ate Arkansas. Marco Rubio? Looks like there’s a porcupine stuck under the shoulder of his sport coat.
Right now, I can’t remember the rest of them (on that side) but I know that they’re divided up between the varsity debaters and the reserve crew whose poll numbers don’t have a heartbeat.
On the other side, Hillary Clinton keeps bobbing her head, and Bernie Sanders looks like my Jewish uncle who shows up to cut the turkey on Thanksgiving and keeps bellowing about how “we need a man like Truman in the White House!” Oy vey—I just don’t feel the love. Don’t feel anything, really.
Not so in the heady days of the 1960’s.
What generation since has loved, truly loved, a good cross-section of our national leaders, be it the grandiloquent Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or the strangely aloof but perceptive Senator Eugene McCarthy or the elegiac and compelling and late-maturing Senator Robert F. Kennedy? Oh, how we felt our heart strings tugged when RFK, imperially-thin, uncommonly eloquent, challenged us: “We can do better!”
We were afraid, we were wary, we were in danger in those days, but we actually had personal feelings of connection and intimate affinities with many of the men and women who led us in politics, music, poetry, and social justice. And we mourned the martyrs of the time, the iconic Kennedy brothers as well as Dr. King, but also a host of guitarists and lyricists and writers and countless, faceless soldiers, nurses, chaplains, and students and housewives who marched and even died in favor of a better society that cherished values more than valuables.
And the words of the more famous ones—from the Beatles to Bobby—are words that we recall, as clearly as we remember the words of our parents, or the first movie we saw with that certain date, or what transpired in the city high school which I attended from the inception of the federal government’s civil rights legislation in 1964 through the Woodstock wonder and the Apollo moon landing of 1969.
My friends and I saw the moon back then but what we got is an earth where hope seems as bleak as the lunar landscape. But at least we remember what we saw and what we dreamed. We can live with that; memory for us is more than digital space on a computer.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com