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Mayor's Message
“Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?”
- Robert F. Kennedy (adapted from Playwright George Bernard Shaw)
In June of 1968, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Senator Ted Kennedy stood before a grieving nation to eulogize his brother Robert F. Kennedy. As he reached the end of his remarks, he chose words that captured not only Robert Kennedy’s life, but his enduring challenge to all of us: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?”
Those words came originally from the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, but they became inseparable from Robert Kennedy because they expressed something essential about how he saw the world, and how he believed change was made. As a recent high school graduate heading off to college, I was very attuned to Robert Kennedy’s message during his campaign for President, and his assassination caused many young people my age to ask the question, Why? Our country was fractured by war, racial injustice, political violence, and a sense that the great American experiment might be failing. We just didn’t ask the question, why, we looked at the world around us and asked why is this happening?
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