To still feel democracy’s dream

“For a couple of years after my arm was gone,” he said, sipping his drink, “it still felt as if it was there.”

Then he told us what a phantom limb was, about how, for a time, he could still feel the entire arm, though he could no longer see it.

I thought about this moment not long ago as I was going through a footlocker of college memorabilia from those years. In it, I found a 1968 photograph torn from a magazine that I’d taped to the refrigerator door in an apartment where I was living.   

It was a time so long ago it resides beyond the memories of a great many people. Yet, the portal through which one enters the great possibilities of American democracy calls out to each of us differently, and this is when it called out to me.

The photo showed Robert Kennedy, who was running for president at the time, standing on top of an automobile. It was a bright, sunny day, and Kennedy was in his shirtsleeves, those sleeves rolled up, as they often were, beyond his elbows. He was leaning far over — someone was holding his legs so he wouldn’t fall — and he wore an expression of pure joy and excitement upon his face. He bent so that he could touch and hold the many hands outstretched toward him as they sought to touch him, too, excitement shining on the many faces as they encircled the car. I’m sure he had just finished a speech that was like many of the speeches he gave: about one’s engagement with America, of what was possible if one was responsive to and responsible for the world in which one was living. That each of us matters. That each of us is infused with value. That we are one people — and like a body populated with an infinite variety of cells, each of us so important and necessary to the whole.

He often spoke words like these into cheering, diverse crowds — crowds that mirrored the country he passionately wanted to lead.

As I held the newspaper clipping, a haunting, indelibly engraved feeling from my deep past echoed through me — a past gone, but still felt.

A past, certainly, before the tide of time changed so much, when a candidate could alight upon the roof of a car without any fear for his or her safety. But, also a time when, if you were one of those excitedly encircling a candidate on the campaign trail, the difficult beauty of living in a democracy might still thrill you. And thrilling you, might thrill the world.

I do not mean to make something of that picture of Robert Kennedy campaigning that didn’t exist. At the time, the country was riven terribly by a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam. But it was also a time when we could have faith in the dynamism of democracy, its vibrancy, its possibilities for change, its fervent prayer that it exists for all of us. A belief in the miracle that it exists at all.

A belief so much needed now, as we seem to endlessly pingpong between the soul-crushing conversational loop of the precarious possibility of autocracy versus the inevitable creep of mortality’s consequences. When many of us live in the gated communities of our hearts, taking refuge in our differences, and as the writer Wallace Stegner once put it, recognizing goodness only when it is wrapped in the robes of our own crowd. And when the romance of our country — its founding principles, its liberty and the sense that we reside in one of the glorious anterooms of freedom’s history — seems like an ever-receding dream.

I yearn to awaken into each day animated by the belief that our country is awakening into the best version of itself.

I have read that nostalgia can be roused in us less by the memory of what once actually was than by the memory of what once was possible in our dreams. But I know absolutely that I can still feel what it was like to be alive in that exciting dream of democracy, that dream that resonated passionately with our country’s best intentions.

I must believe — I must — that we will feel that way again.     

Mike Nagler was a longtime member of the Burlingame Library Board and taught for many years at Cañada College.