Kennedy Townsend urges youth to get into politics

By Steve Hinnefeld 331-4374 | shinnefeld@heraldt.com
April 27, 2007

"It's great that record numbers of young people are involved in community service through volunteer activities", Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said.

But it’s a shame that so many steer clear of another means of civic engagement: political activity and government service.

“Government is where we make our most solemn common decisions,” she said. And when it’s attacked as unworthy, “that hurts our ability to build a strong community.”

Townsend is the oldest child of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy and a niece of John F. Kennedy. She was in Bloomington Thursday to speak at a fundraiser dinner for the O’Bannon Institute for Community Service at Ivy Tech Community College.

She was lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003 and counts as one of her primary achievements that she helped make community service a requirement for high school graduation.

But she said it’s disappointing that students who boast of their volunteerism — planting trees, tutoring children, delivering meals to the elderly — often won’t dirty their hands with politics.

“I think that’s a loss of talent and energy and vision,” she said.

Townsend, a Democrat, attributed the nation’s turn against politics, in part, to strategy by some Republicans. She recalled when Ronald Reagan said government was the problem, not the solution.

“If you’re good and bright and smart, why do you go to the place where the problem is?” she said.

Her new book, “Failing America’s Faithful,” is based on a related theme, she said. It argues that churches have “shrunken God” through a narrow focus on sex and abortion.

She tells how, in 1968, the television interviewer David Frost asked both her father and Reagan, “Why are we on Earth?” Reagan talked about freedom and individual salvation. Robert Kennedy talked about making life better for others.

“There it is in a nutshell,” she said. “Do I care primarily about me? Or do we care about community?”