Whole New World takes inspiration from

The Life and Spirit of Robert F. Kennedy

In his 1968 presidential campaign speeches, Senator Robert F. Kennedy often repeated these inspirational words:

Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say, why not?”

Thisfamous quoteThis quote derives from a line of dialogue from Back to Methuselah, a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1949.not only conveys RFK’s desire to live in a better world, a longing virtually all of us share; it also expresses his visionary passion to help create such a world.

Bobby Kennedy was a champion for the disadvantaged, for civil rights, for equality and justice. He advocated eloquently for peace and was committed to nonviolence. He fought fiercely to protect the environment. Bobby envisioned a world of understanding and compassion for all, where everybody could thrive. And he worked tirelessly to make that dream a reality.

I was a 21 year-old senior at UCLA on that awful June night in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and it pains me deeply to this day. More than any other death of a public figure before or since.

And lately I sometimes wonder, when I see the proliferation of heartless, self-serving, divisive rhetoric in our public discourse and the spread of hostility and violence around the world: Did the death of Bobby Kennedy that fateful night also mark the onset of the death of any realistic hope of creating the better world he dedicated his life to?

I fervently do not want to believe that, and in fact I do not. Yet a growing sense of fatalism, pessimism, and hopelessness casts a palpable shadow across the land. And while I don’t hold a bleak view myself, I am painfully aware of the manifest reasons why so many of us do.

Rekindling the Spirit

But we dare not, we must not abandon our shared dream of a better world. Indeed, the acutely troubled times we live in implore us to imagine that world more vividly than ever before. And then work resolutely and creatively to realize our vision.

This Whole New World blog was created in the spirit of making some small contribution to building the peaceful, just, and healthy world that Bobby Kennedy devoted his life to pursuing.

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In one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches ever given, Kennedy spoke extemporaneously to a crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, delivering the news that Martin Luther King had been murdered earlier that day.

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 63 days later.

On June 8, three days after Bobby’s death, Ted Kennedy delivered this eulogy, in which he quotes at length from one of his brother’s most famous speeches.