Yuba Net: RFK, JR.: Wilderness Crucial, Press Clueless, Bush A Bitter Pill

RFK, JR.: Wilderness Crucial, Press Clueless, Bush A Bitter Pill

By: Cynthia Karpa, YubaNet
Published: Nov 6, 2006 at 16:44

The Bush White House is the worst in American history and the press has let America down, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told a quiet standing-room-only crowd of about 500 in a Yosemite conference hall Friday morning.

Scion of a Democratic political family, Kennedy preached to the choir for 65 minutes to about 450 Sierra Business Council attendees and some Park Service employees at the famed national park.

Activists, planners, developers, and civic leaders including the mayors of Auburn and Colfax traveled from as far north as Plumas County to attend the 12th annual conference of the Sierra Business Council to learn the latest in conserving both the region's land and its economy. The news that "there's no problem with the Tioga Road" gained more applause then the announcement that "RFK is in the house."

Once Kennedy began speaking at 10:30 a.m. he scarcely stopped to take a drink of water, hoisting listeners up the Hudson River and then Mount Horeb, and conjuring early American life over the next hour. A senior attorney for New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, Kennedy invoked old English and ancient Roman law.

Kennedy's speech disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, is said to make speech difficult, but that was not evident in his breakneck pace. Starting by calling Yosemite "the prettiest place in America," he detailed how in Grotonville, NY fishermen, losing their livelihood because of a petroleum company's discharge into their fishing waters, prevailed using a little-known 1880 statute.

Kennedy called the people Pres. George W. Bush has appointed to run agencies designed to protect natural resources as "bottom feeders" and "indentured servants" responsible "for the diminution of the quality of life over the last six years." (Kennedy recently wrote a book entitled "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.")

Examples of environmentally destructive practices flowed out of Kennedy like the Hudson River.

Kennedy cited a currently accepted practice of shaving off the tops of mountains with a 22-story-high machine to get at coal seams. "It's all illegal," he said.

That's an easy story to miss, he said, because the media are mainly five giant corporations run as profit centers that cater to "the reptilian center of our brains" more interested in "sex and celebrity gossip." That's why people "know more about Brad and Angelina than global warming," he said.

"The negligent press has let down America," he said.

We have a duty to our children to protect the air, water and land, "the infrastructure of nature," Kennedy said.

"I don't think there is any such thing as Democratic or Republican children," he said.

Three of his sons have asthma, he said, due in part to the crummier air, full of particulates often from coal-fired plants, that children breathe these days.

Wilderness - which twice he called "the undiluted creation of the Creator" - formed America, he said. James Fennimore Cooper was an atrocious writer, Kennedy said, but in his Leatherstocking series, which includes "Last of the Mohicans," he created a new creature, an American, in Natty Bumpo.

About Republicans, Kennedy said:

1) "How did these people miss the entire point of America?"
2) "I think they don't understand what makes America worth fighting for."
3) "Eighty percent of Republicans are Democrats who don't know what's going on."

He compared them to Pharisees, and paraphrased a Bible verse, "for they bind heavy burdens...and lift not a finger to help them."

It was fundamentalists who called for Christ to be killed, he said.

"Am I out of time? I don't have a clock up here," Kennedy asked after a half an hour of speaking.

"Nooooooo," many in the crowd assured him.

Kennedy recalled how when campaigning overseas with his Uncle Jack Kennedy "people came out because they loved America."

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001, the front page headline of Paris daily newspaper Le Monde was "We are all Americans now." People overseas held candlelight vigils for two weeks marking the American loss, Kennedy said. But Europe's lost that loving feeling after the United States' war in Iraq.

"It took 230 years of discipline and restraint to build up that reservoir of goodwill," he said. Today America is the most hated country in the world, he stated.

"That, to me, is the bitterest pill to swallow," he said.

Kennedy closed with a saying he credited to the Lakota - "We don't inherit the world from our ancestors: We borrow it from our children." - and got a standing ovation.

The only credentials that Kennedy, with degrees from Harvard University, University of Virginia Law School, and Pace University and who studied at the London School of Economics, mentioned was a master falconer's license and $30 New York state fishing license.

Famous people visit Yosemite on occasion, recently including Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, said Scott Gediman, media relations chief for the park. Singer Kenny Rogers recently filmed an infomercial in the park, he said. Park rangers took some security precautions for Kennedy's visit; naturally, they couldn't be outlined.

Sierra Business Council organizers charted the carbon emissions created by the conference, using biodegradable materials. Emissions from Kennedy's plane would have to be factored in as well, one organizer said.

After he finished speaking, and had answered a few questions from the audience, people lined up to talk to Kennedy, many with reminiscences of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, John F. Kennedy, both assassinated a few years apart in the mid-1960s.

Outside the hall, people talked about Kennedy and his speech. Jan Cutts, Forest Service District Ranger on American River District, said Kennedy's speech was "inspiring and depressing at the same time."

Suzanne Moss, director of campaigns for The Trust for Public Land/Western Region, agreed with Kennedy's "bitter pill."

"That's how I feel," she said.

The Sierra Business Council plans to post links to comments of speakers at its conference on its web site next week.