I’d just moved back from living in the Haight, newly married to the man I met at a Grateful Dead Concert at the Fillmore. I’d just helped my best friend get the money for an abortion in Mexico because women couldn’t get them legally in California. I marched for civil rights. I tossed out my bras. I knew change was in the air, big time.

But the morning after I cast my first vote—for Robert Francis Kennedy in the California Primary—the voice on the TV told me that idealism ended on the floor of a hotel kitchen. It was good that I was next to my bed right then because my knees buckled and I just stared at the images, refusing to process any more words.

Then, just as four-and-a-half years before in November 1963 when John Kennedy was killed, began the mind numbing days of staring at the television coverage of something too sad, too terrible to be real—except there it was, the family we all knew, plunged yet again into bottomless sorrow. I can never forget the emotional eulogy that Ted Kennedy—these days thrown into his own life-and-death struggle with brain cancer—spoke of his brother, and how his voice finally betrayed his heartbreak as he said,
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

I believed in Camelot until that day at Wilson High School when the principal’s voice came over the P.A.. system and announced that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas.

I believed the civil rights movement was a success and that their leader would keep it going, until April of 1968 when a black co-worker came into my office and sobbed the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination. He was a big, Black Power kinda guy with a ‘fro, who was sitting there saying through gritted teeth, “It will never get better; evil will always take away good. The system will never change, the top dog will always win against the underdog.” The trifecta of tragedy was complete for our generation.

Forward to 40 years later, and the 2008 California Primary lands around my birthday, and the cheers for this year’s victors come on a sad anniversary, and the dark memories come back. Sorry I’m having trouble getting caught up in all the enthusiasm. But maybe, in this election year, you could give us skeptics a break. It isn’t that we don’t believe in a young politician who talks of bringing about change. It’s that we’ve been there before.

Tags: 1968, 2008, jfk, politics, primaries, rfk