July 13, 2023
The Front Porch reports:
There is a great magnetism to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I, my wife, and many of my closest friends—despite the hallucination publicitaire spawned by our mainstream media in an attempt to reduce the man to a cartoon—find ourselves moved by Mr. Kennedy in a way no other political figure has moved us before. I’ve been puzzling over why this is the case and feel I’ve found a clue in a recent interview Mr. Kennedy did with Charles Eisenstein.
Before I delve into the interview I think it would be helpful to share a bit about my wife and friends. My wife is a mother and elementary school teacher, and my friends are motley. One is a carpenter; one a real estate broker; one runs a local art center; one is a farmer; one is a beekeeper; one runs a landscaping business; one is a web designer; and one is a screenwriter. Some didn’t go to college; some went to Ivy League schools. Most are generally suspicious of what they read in “the papers” (though not a one, I’m sure of it, would call herself/himself “civilized”). Most are parents with young kids. And regarding Mr. Kennedy, all appear startled, almost sheepishly so, by their enthusiasm for the man. As my wife said to me one night recently, with a kind of groggy wonder: “I didn’t know how thirsty I was until I was shown a glass of water.”
About halfway into the above-mentioned interview, Mr. Eisenstein asks Mr. Kennedy: “How do you stay positive and upbeat and energetic? What’s your source of solidity?”
In light of Kennedy’s past—the loss of his father to murder, his uncle to murder, an ex-wife (and mother of four of his children) to suicide, his bygone struggle with addiction, and the current media-shelling—I’ve wondered the same thing. (And that’s not mentioning the stress of raising seven children and his high-stakes work as a lawyer on behalf of the Hudson River and other waterways; on behalf of Indigenous peoples; and on behalf of folks fighting against Goliaths like Monsanto and DuPont over their pollution. And that’s not mentioning the books he’s written and statements he’s made sharply questioning and criticizing our government and medical establishment.)
And this was Mr. Kennedy’s response to Mr. Eisenstein, delivered in his shaky catching voice with his grave, pointblank, glancingly wry demeanor:
Read the full opinion piece here.
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