Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre ?

Usually when it comes to politics I tend to err on the side of cynicism but for some reason I really want this to be true. For a very long time my favorite historical figure has been Robert Kennedy. There was so much promise in the 1968 Presidential Campaign and the tragedy that befell him leaves me with lingering thoughts of what could have been. I've always thought of the year 1968 as a promise that the world sorely needed to be fulfilled but was for the most part was buried with its leaders, King in April and RFK only two months later. True the causes they stood for did not disappear after the summer of '68 but no one can deny that the movements took a staggering blow with their deaths one which I feel they have still not fully recovered from even forty years later. Four decades is a long time and a lot changes after that long. You'd be hard pressed to find a connection between The Lawrence Welk Show and anything on the television today (if you don't know what that is go ask someone over 35) But still I can't help but be struck by the similarities of those times and our own.

Now before I go any further I have to make something very clear. I never have been and I never will be a proponent of the statement "we should learn from the past because the past repeats it's self" That's a ridiculous oversimplification that a very poor history teacher feeds to a classroom full of surly tenth graders as an excuse for why they should care about William of Orange and The Glorious Revolution. No, history dose not travel on a circular path and once we experience a moment there is no returning to it. Maybe Yeats got it right, (in his own sort of apocalyptic-crazy-guy-with-an "the end is near sign"-kind -of-way) when he described history as a spiral, growing outward occasionally passing by and sharing similarities with previous points on the spiral. Then again maybe there is no organization to history, after all Yeats claimed that a ghost had given him this theory and that the world would end in 1921.

With that said I was struck a few days ago when I listened to the audio of Barack Obama's Presidential Announcement. I could not believe how much it sounded like the speeches given by Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968. Now it's not fair to either one of them to compare them too closely but as someone who has spent a lot of the last year studying 20th century American history I can't help but marvel how the "spiral" has found it's way back to these circumstances forty years later. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking, a member of Generation Y in search of his own "rendezvous with destiny". Whatever the case may be I feel the need to believe in this. I really truly want this to be my '68, lord knows we could use one.

peace out yo