Dick Van Dyke, the showbiz legend who’s been making us laugh for generations upon generations, is turning 99 next month. Throughout his career (which began back in 1947), he’s made his mark with the likes of Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Dick Tracy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and six Emmy Awards, the latest of which came earlier this year, and marked him as the oldest-living Emmy winner in history.
But he made a very different kind of mark 60 years ago, standing alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the actor read “A Most Non-Political Speech,” written by The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. And with one of the most crucial elections in United States history taking place, Van Dyke reminds us who we are and what we stand for, and he’s never been more correct in his (very long) life.
“Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating. None of those are the transcendent facet of the human personality; they’re diseases. They’re cancer to the soul. They are the infectious, contagious viruses that have been breeding humanity for years. And because they have been, and because they are, is it necessary that they shall be? I think not.”
Van Dyke resonates with compassion and humanism, as he presents Serling’s declaration of love first voiced 60 years ago, inherent to every human being who walks this Earth. “Man’s essential decency, his basic goodness, his preeminent dignity has been made a matter of record [on this spring evening of 1964]. There will be moments of violence and expressions of hatred; an ugly echo of intolerance. But these are the clinging vestiges of a decayed past… To those who tell us the inequality of the human animal is a necessary evil, we must respond by simply saying that first, it is evil, but not necessary.”
Folks, there is nothing political about this election. This isn’t a matter of Democrat versus Republican, left versus right, policy against policy; this is a matter of preventing a vehemently traumatized, manipulative, aggressive, and ethically-gouged man take control of one of the world’s most powerful nations.
Donald Trump, in all his calculated fearmongering, is as anti-Republican as the most diehard Democrat out there, weakening the GOP’s foundation of tradition by giving his followers permission to embrace the evils of America’s past. White nationalism, quite plainly, cannot be allowed to define any nation, let alone one with as much influence as the United States.
So whatever distrust you harbor towards the Democratic Party and the wider American political machine, its capacity for destruction will reach horrific heights if Donald Trump is returned the keys to the White House. And as the world watches the tally with bated breath, remember, citizens of America, that hatred is not political, and must be rejected for the good of humanity’s soul.
For his part, Van Dyke (and Serling) chooses guarded optimism.
“If there’s one voice left to say ‘welcome’ to a stranger, if there’s one hand outstretched to say ‘enter and share,’ if there’s one mind remaining to think a thought of warmth and friendship, then there’s a future in which we’ll find more than one hand, more than one voice and more than one mind dedicated to the cause of man’s equality. Wishful? Hopeful? Unassured? Problematical and not to be guaranteed, that’s all true.”