Unfiltered Ocean

This blog is almost exclusively political, with some religious undertones as of late and the occasional pop culture reference. But today, I'd like to take a moment to write about someone I considered a role model. When a celebrity dies, I normally feel some sadness for them. But I get over it pretty quickly because I never knew them personally and like the rest of us, they're human, and all of us eventually meet our maker one way or another. The world continues to spin with or without us. Anthony Bourdain, however, was the epitome of cool. He got paid to travel around the world and try new things, which for an impressionable adolescent growing up isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was mind-bending and exciting. He had a dirty, but hilarious sense of humor. But more importantly, Bourdain was open minded. He would talk to people and show the rest of us a snapshot of their culture, which always impressed me. In his Hawaii episode of Parts Unknown, he went to Moloka

On this day 50 years ago, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died from the bullets of Sirhan Sirhan. In the same decade, his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were also slain by the guns of assassins. In many ways, R.F.K.'s death was the tip of the iceberg for our country. People who our nation looked up to, who were seen as unifiers in a nation divided by race, the haves, and have-nots, anti-Vietnam and pro-Vietnam, and the other ways in which people were split apart, were suddenly gone. Fifty years on, what can we learn from the life and death of R.F.K.? Perhaps the greatest lesson we can take from R.F.K. is how he evolved as a politician and ultimately as a person. R.F.K. wasn't always the radical liberal icon that he has come to be. He was born into one of America's wealthiest families, and as such, grew up without the worries of the average American. He and his family associated with other elite families, attended elite sch