More uplifting from RFK and Daniel Ellsberg

This is not an age of heroes. Did it end with the assassinations in the ‘60s? What I wrote about Tuesday was how, if those inspiration people were speaking now, when we have the internet, they might have swept us into the next reality where we become a caring species instead of a warring one. Then again, maybe this absence of heroes now is a step forward on the evolutionary path where the power for change has to come from the bottom up, up to all of us.

Here are two extraordinary historical characters. Someone sent me this RFK video as what The Great Dictator speech called to mind. There aren’t good versions of the original talk on YouTube, and this is the text under this version: “…a short visual documentary on Robert F. Kennedy and the speech he first delivered to the National Union of South African Students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on June 6th, 1966. After his assassination during his 1968 presidential bid, his brother, Senator Edward M. ‘Ted’ Kennedy, delivered the same speech at his brother's funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, on June 8th, 1968.”

There are no words to express appreciation to Daniel Ellsberg, who expected to go to jail for exposing the Pentagon Papers. I shared the extraordinary Substack he wrote earlier this year when he got a terminal diagnosis, and four months later he was gone. This is a memorial service for him, and if you want an experience where you will be uplifted by heroism you can speed it up a bit, since it’s very long, and let yourself be swept away. You’ll find Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and other familiar icons doing tributes. You may not know that Daniel’s wife, Patricia, is the late great Barbara Marx Hubbard’s sister.

---

With most subscribers carried over from Constant Contact and not being familiar with the Substack world, I get a lot of direct replies to each post. Instead, if you comment here we can have the conversations I’ve been trying to generate. First-timers will have to complete your Substack profile to be able to comment on the Substack platform!