If JFK walked amongst us now……

I don’t watch much TV but I do sometimes enjoy it as background when ‘Reeling in the Years’ is airing. This simple, straightforward reflection on aspects of a particular year from the last four decades or so offers clear highlights without judgement; and the visuals remind us how far we’ve come in such a short time. But of course it’s the music I really leave it on to enjoy. Hearing a song I once loved and still remember every word of is fantastic, energising, wonderful,…..until I realise it’s over forty years old!

It wasn’t however, the music that had me prick up my ears on this occasion. It was the sonorous tones of JFK as he delivered one of his rallying call speeches in his campaign to support the civil rights movement being spear- headed by Martin Luther King.  The socialist agenda, clear now if not then, is stark as he emphatically commits to working with ‘black and white, rich and poor’, towards equal opportunity for all, irrespective of race or creed or background.

And it gets me thinking. It gets me thinking about our brethren across the water. Our sisters and brothers and our hoards of cousins, who grew up in the rose tinted light cast by the ever glowing Sacred Heart; who did their homework beneath the omnipresent photographs of the Pope and JFK, and who understood from an early age that both were to be honoured and admired equally.

And it got me thinking about that history and how it’s been turned on its head by our brethren across the water who chose to step out of Europe in order to strengthen their borders; who have long forgotten their own childhood poverty of hand-me-down clothes and tins of spam; for whom a ‘salad’ was lettuce and a tomatoe with a boiled egg,- and when there was company – a jar of pickled beetroot.  It got me thinking about my own parents and their generation who, from their experience of emigration and poverty, admired and even beatified the Kennedys,  but whose social status now is now entirely different. They live in nice parts of cities and their children have ‘done well’ for themselves. No building site, cleaners or bus driver jobs for this generation.  No, they are professionals: solicitors, bankers, teachers and doctors; they are leading lights in their churches (albeit because they want to ensure their kids get into the best catholic schools); they have never experienced discrimination or exclusion, and in fact, their strongly held irishness means they are often sought out as the source of all craic.

So what if JFK walked amongst us now? Would he be embraced as he was back then as the voice of our forefathers? Would we commend his courage and commitment and support his vision of egalitarianism? Or would we dismiss him for the socialist he surely was? A crack pot with no value for those who get up in the morning?  Sadly I suspect that a version of JFK today, espousing with eloquence and empathy a future in which we can all achieve, and a world in which our differences are celebrated, would be met with hysteria, disdain or incredulity. Possibly a combination of all three. A man of the time and for the time… JFK was certainly that, but we need a leader now too, possibly more than ever.