POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In a piece for the Undernews daily newsletter from the Progressive Review, Sam Smith recalls his activism in the 1960s and how the traumatic events of 1968 affected him and many activists like him.

Near the end of the piece, he quotes from a piece that he wrote during that period:

The nation had watched John Kennedy die and had not changed. It had watched Martin Luther King die and had not changed. And it had watched Robert Kennedy die. . . .The central point of these tragedies was not their proximate cause but rather that we, as a nation, had assigned so much of the burden of hope, progress, decency and faith to so few men.

Tomorrow I shall go down to see the funeral cortege arrive at Union Station. I shall go not just out of sorrow and respect, but also to try to find some small sign that we collectively — without waiting for someone else to do it for us — are willing and able to have a dream, or seek a newer world. Then, perhaps, we can become young again.

And then he adds this current observation:

The dreams we had held so strongly were dead. It was probably around then that I learned that dreams were fulfilled not by heroes but by a people who share them and do something about it.

Sam Smith’s complete piece, “The Death of Dreams,” is available at: http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-death-of-dreams.html.