Is Your Food Grown by Oppressed Farmworkers? with Kerry Kennedy

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I think people's instinct is to say, there's nothing I can do. What can I do? I don't have the power. I'm not the president. I'm not a senator. I'm not a governor. But there's stuff we can do. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

People always tell me that they miss.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Farmacy, the F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about human rights and justice and what can be done to fix some of the big injustices and disparities in our society, then this conversation is going to matter to you because it's none other than Kerry Kennedy, who's the president of the RFK human rights program, which is an incredible organization that I've been involved with over the years. And she comes by this honestly. She's since 1981 worked on many human rights issues, including child labor, disappearing people, farm workers rights, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, women's rights and the environment, and lots more. She's written a number of best-selling books, including Being Catholic Now and Robert F. Kennedy, Ripples of Hope and Speak Truth to Power. human rights defenders who are changing our world. She's a good friend. I've known her for a long time, and we've had many conversations about all these issues. And she's just doing such good in the world. She's also done something really remarkable, which is use the power of money for social good through putting pressure, basically, on fund managers of large asset pools, about $5 to $7 trillion, to influence them to make financial investment decisions based on human rights concerns and social justice issues, which I think is remarkable and effective and brilliant. So thank you for that, Carrie. She's a graduate of Brown University, Boston College Law. She's received the Medal for Social Activism from the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates and many, many other honorary degrees. And she's the mother of three beautiful daughters, all of whom I know, Kara, Ryan, and Mikayla.

So welcome, Carrie. So great to be with you, Mark.

Yeah, so good to be with you. So I spent a lot of time with your family and what's really remarkable about the whole crew from the kids to the parents to the grandparents is just the level of deep love and care for other people and not just in an abstract way, but through deep activism and social justice efforts across the whole family. And it's just striking how your family has created that culture. I've sort of been reading about your dad, Robert F. Kennedy, and the story of how he decided to go to Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta in 1967 and'68. And what he saw was so striking to him that in America, and he said he'd been to third world countries and never seen anything like this, but he saw things in America that he imagined never could exist here. He went to one home, which There was a mother with seven kids. There were no tables. There was no cutlery, the toilet, there was no plumbing. There were roaches and rats running all over the floor. And there was a 20 month old baby boy playing on the floor with rice grains. And he was covered in sores and had stomach bloated and hunger like a kid from some developing country. And he came back pretty shaken up from that experience. And I sort of remember hearing the story of how he came home and he was just really agitated. And so do you remember what happened when he came home, how did it impact you and all of your brothers and sisters who've all sort of followed in the footsteps of his work?

Well, we have, I have 10 brothers and sisters, and he came home from that trip and ours was a very loud household. And it was the only, we were all eating dinner, which was a particularly loud thing, because there were all these kids at the dinner table and clinking spoons and arguing over who got the butter and whatever. And he walked in the door and it was the first time, I think the only time in my childhood when there was dead silence in the room. And we all looked up at him and he said, I've just been to a part of our country where three families live in a room the size of this dining room. And I want you to do something to help those children. We've got to help those children. And, you know, it was striking because my parents worked on social justice. They lived it. It was part of their faith life. It was part of their. It's what they did. And it was part and parcel of who they were in every imaginable way, but they never said, you, have to do this to us. There was never a directive. And now it's the only time it was a directive. And it really wasn't sort of instructing us. It was more of an expression of his kind of a feeling of the urgency of now to address poverty in America. And as a matter of fact, that led to, because he was on the Hunger Commission for the United States Senate, and that led to an extraordinary expansion of food stamps. the woman who took him around on that trip was called Marion Wright, and she was a local civil rights activist. And his staff member who was working on it for him was a guy called Peter Edelman. And Marion and Peter met on that trip, and they eventually got married the following year in the summer of 1968. And that's Marian Wright Edelman, who took Daddy on that trip.

And at that time, there's still many states where it was illegal for African-Americans and whites to marry, right?

Exactly. Yeah, it was, and it had just become legal in Washington, D.C. when they got married. After that trip, you know, my father said to her, you should get a group of poor people and bring them to the Senate and get them to come and talk. And she did that and he kept checking in with her and saying, what's happening? How's it going? And she was saying, well, we're really not getting the type of movement on this that we need to address the extent of the issue in America. So he finally said, listen, this is what you should do. Don't get two or three people, get thousands and thousands of poor people across the country.

And.

They need to be African American, but they should be white, Latino, and they should be from all parts of the country, and they should be all colors of the rainbow. And you should do a march on Washington for poor people. And she said, that is a really interesting idea. And she went immediately very excited about it. and saw Martin Luther King. And he said, yeah, that's what we ought to be doing. And so the last three months of his life or four months of his life, he was organizing the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. And that's, and then they brought that campaign to Washington in June 1968, which was just when my father was killed. and I remember when the funeral, I was only eight years old, but when the funeral train came down from St. Patrick's in New York, and, and then we got to the train station in Washington, DC, and they took the casket down, and then there was a, you know, funeral train through the city, and we passed by the area where all the poor people were camped out for the Poor People's March, and they all flooded up to the side of the road to, you know, bring tears to my eyes, but, and started singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Wow. Which was, you know, the song that was so closely associated with my dad. So, yeah, so that's, and now Peter Edelman, 52 years later, continues to be on the board of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Marian is of course a great friend and inspiration.

That's an incredible story. Is that what sort of you think inspired you to dedicate your life to the work you're doing?

Well, you know, when people ask me that, I mean, I always think I'm the seventh child of 11. When you come that far down, you appreciate human rights at a very young age.

You mean your rights were violated by your brothers and sisters, you mean?

Yeah, but you know, it was survival.

Of the fittest, clearly in that family.

I remember when my parents were, oh, my earliest memories, my dad was in the Justice Department. He was the Attorney General at the height of the civil rights movement. And we always, and my parents didn't separate their home life from their work life. So we always had civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and indigenous leaders who always at our house talking to my dad, but also playing football with us and swimming. all that kind of stuff. And then my mother used to, we had a huge convertible when we were kids, and she would take six or seven kids and throw us into the back of the convertible and two or three dogs and a football, bring us down to the Justice Department. And we would, my father didn't use an office. He used a hallway. And he wanted to have a hallway so he could throw the football across the hall, you know, in his office. And so we would run around his office and then we always liked to go to the, there was a tunnel underneath the Justice Department brought you to the FBI building and you could watch the sharpshooters at practice. So we loved to do that. And one day we were down there watching the sharpshooters and, and at the time the head of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover.

Yeah.

A man not known for his love of children or his sense of humor. And he said at the time that the two biggest threats to American democracy are Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.

Wow.

And so, you know, my mother liked to tease him. And so she, there was a suggestion box in the FBI building, which is already pretty funny. There used to be suggestion boxes everywhere. You never see this anymore. And anyway, there used to be, and so she put in the suggestion. And by the time she got all the kids and the football and the dogs and got us back up to my dad's office, an astute FBI agent had gone and picked out her suggestion, brought it up to Edgar Hoover, who had it immediately sent to my dad's office. So when we were walking back in, he was reading it and said, Get a new director.

Oh boy, that sounds like your mom.

Funny, because if you knew the power of Dan or Hoover at that time and his presence in our country, it was a great thing to do.

He was the law.

Yeah, for the lack of it. But anyways, so it was, you know, it's an early lesson in the importance of speaking truth to power.

That's what it is.

Another time I went to see my dad, He wrote me this letter, which I still have on my wall, and it says, Dear Carrie, today was a historic day, not just because of your visit, but because two African Americans over the objections of Governor Wallace were able to register at the University of Alabama. And I hope these events are long past by the time you get your pretty little head to college.

Yeah.

You know, love and kisses, daddy. And I think, I think my, my parents, my dad really tried to integrate, as I say, their, their work, their belief there in social justice and to everything they did as, as, as human beings, as, and as parents. And I think that When I learned, I could just tell this last story, when I learned to tie my shoe, I made sure that if I put the right one on first, I tied the left one first because I didn't, I wanted there to be a quality and I didn't want them to be different.

I think it was in my.

Blood and everything.

Yeah, well it's clearly been in your blood all the way through because your work has been just so dedicated to social justice and human rights across the world. It is just sort of striking every time I check out what you're doing and some other thing you're doing across the world that's calling out injustice, that's helping people claim their rights, that's exposing things that need to get exposed. And I think you've done that throughout your life. And one of the things that I paid attention to a little bit is the work you've done around food and farm workers. rights. And I think people don't understand this country, the level of injustice that exists around our farm workers. They're a group that has been and food workers also, but there was an act that was in the 1930s, a couple of acts, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, which set the protections for workers in our workforce. but it excluded food and farm workers, mostly because they were black or brown. And that is something that persists to today in most states, even though people aren't aware of this. And they're incredibly under protected. And you worked with New York State to introduce something that I think was one of the most compelling pieces of legislation anywhere to expose these things and to address it. And you were part of a movie called Food Chains which talked about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So I'd love you to sort of break down what is the state of farm workers in America today, because we all depend on them for our food. And what are the injustices they're suffering from and what do we need to know? Because it seems to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and they seem to be neglected victims of our food system.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Mark, for talking about that. indeed, farm workers are among the most exploited workers in America. About, you know, somewhere between 75 and 86% don't have permanent working papers. A lot of them have papers that allow them to work for a certain number of months, but then not afterwards. and that's at the pleasure of their employer. So their employer, they often have their wages stolen from them. They often are threatened with deportation if they file complaints. And sexual exploitation of women is endemic. in the farm worker community, I interviewed women in almost every county of New York State, and all but three of the women told me they had been sexually assaulted on the job. And this is, you know, often if you want the pleasure of having a job, you have to perform sexual favors. So that's One of the big issues in New York State, up until we passed that legislation last summer, farm workers had no right to a day off per week, had no right to overtime pay, had no right to workers comp, and it was illegal to do any kind of collective bargaining. So what does that mean? So one of the farm workers who I talked to said, I said, what are your working hours? He said, I work three four-hour shifts. I go from midnight. He was on a duck farm. So this is, it's making foie gras, right? It's a factory farm. Yeah, he was making foie gras. So if you go into any fancy restaurant and see foie gras on the menu. If you're east of the Mississippi and you say, where does that come from? They'll almost all say it comes from Hudson Valley foie gras. And that's all from this one farm, Hudson Valley foie gras. Anyway, so he said he works three four-hour shifts, midnight till 4:00 a.m., goes to sleep, then 8:00 a.m. till 12:00 noon, sleeps for four hours and starts again 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and starts again at midnight.

That's a recipe for getting very sick very fast.

Okay, so I said, so when do you get a day off? And he goes, no, we don't get a day off. Do you get a day off on Sunday? You're Catholic? He goes, no, no, on Sunday. How about after the ducks get Too fat and they're ready for slaughter. Do you get a day off then? No, no day off. How about Christmas or Easter? Do you get those days off? No, because the ducks gotta eat on Christmas and Easter. When do you get a day off? He said, I worked here for 10 years without a single day off.

10 years.

10 years. What was your housing like? 10 by 16 foot room, two king-size mattresses, Two couples and four single men sleeping in shifts. One group goes on, one group goes off. How about that?

Sounds like slavery. Yeah.

And minimum wage, no overtime, no workman's comp. His wife was also working on that farm, permanently injured on the job, fired on her way to the hospital. No compensation, no nothing. That was just the end of it. And then he worked there for over 20 years, fired from one day to the next in 2008. So this is all legal in the state of New York.

And the rest of the country too, right?

I mean, it's not... It just depends. And as you pointed out, when President Roosevelt was passing the fair labor legislation under which you and me and every taxi driver and restaurant worker in New York or around the country works. The white supremacist, Dixiecrat senators didn't want blacks to have the same rights as whites. So they said to Roosevelt, we'll only pass this legislation if there's a carve out the two places where blacks can get a job. And those are farm workers and domestic help. So to this day, farm workers and domestic help do not have those federal protections. And so you ask, is it in every state? No, every state has a different set of rules. So when we talk to farm workers about exploitation who were coming up.

The.

Path from Florida up to Maine. Some of them said that actually you would think that exploitation would be worse in Georgia or South Carolina, but in fact it's worse in New York. That's the first state they got to that has a boundary with a foreign country, Canada. And so anytime they did complaints in New York, the farmers would just say, oh, we're gonna report you to the, to ice, and, and you'll be sent back to Mexico or Haiti or wherever you came from. So they felt like they had absolutely no capacity to, to report injustice. But anyway, After a very long, hard struggle, we did get that legislation passed in New York State last year, and thanks to the leadership of Governor Cuomo and of great people in the New York State Senate and people like Tom Dinapoli, who is our state comptroller, but who championed this for his entire career, we were able to get that legislation passed.

And so what do the Farm Workers Fair Labor Practices Act in New York provide for farmers.

So exactly. So they now have minimum wage protections, they have overtime protections, they have, it's no longer illegal for collective bargaining, and they get workers comp. And on the collective bargaining front, why is that important? So it's not just the ability to form a union. We talked to a group of farmers upstate New York who had, they were living in a communal, sort of like a shed with a series of cots in it, 24 of them. And they had one John and the John was broken. So they went to the farmer and they said, the John's broken. Can we fix it? And it didn't get fixed. and they said, well, you know, can you do something? And the farmer said, you know what? I don't like you guys complaining about this, and I don't need to give you housing. You have no housing as of tonight. So I mean, they're in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, New York, miraculously they found another farm, five miles down the road that would give them a place to live. They went back the next day and they said, well, we have a place to live, but now we need transportation. It's middle of nowhere. Can you help us get a bus or pick us up or do something? And he goes, you know what? That's collective bargaining. Wow. You're all fired. Fired them all.

Wow.

So that's no longer allowed in New York.

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This is what happened in New York but the the the real miracle story of farm workers in the United States over the last 50 years is, of course, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers in California. But all of the progress they made in California did not impact other states. You have to go state by state by state because we don't have a federal rule. But there's an organization in South Florida, which you mentioned, that you were marching against Wendy's.

I was.

And ran into my daughter Maya a few months ago on behalf of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. And that is an extraordinary organization that really has come up with a formula that has stopped exploitation and stopped abuse and stopped sexual assault. ended sexual assault among farm workers. And their model is now being used in Bangladesh for garment workers. It's being used in Hollywood for the Me Too movement, and it's being used in the upstate in Vermont for dairy workers. So they've done an incredible job.

Yeah, it's an incredible story. I mean, we can go into it a little bit, but this is a group of farm workers from a number of different countries, from, I think, Jamaica and Mexico. And they were being really abused. They weren't given shelter from the shade. They weren't given water. They weren't given, you know, proper breaks. They weren't given restrooms. They weren't given safe transportation. They had sexual abuses. All these injustices against them. They were paid not a living wage. Again, they were living in these crowded housing environments, working from five in the morning till eight at night. And they figured out how together they could band together to create a movement. And they sort of happened in fits and starts, but they finally figured out that by boycotting not the farmers who were abusing them, but the purchasers of the farm products like Wendy's or like Taco Bell, they were able to pressure the supply chain to change their purchasing practices, which then led to this fair trade, fair labor sort of practices. So can you talk a little bit about how that happened and how they were successful? It's a very compelling story. It wasn't from the outside, it came from the inside.

Yeah. It's an amazing story of people the lowest end of the supply chain, standing up and figuring out how to make things work. But there's a guy called Lucas Benitez and Greg Asbed and a few others who came together and had had it with being exploited and figured out this program. But essentially what they do is, incidentally, they have a legal arm And they successfully prosecuted 15 cases of slavery in the United States over the last decade. 15 cases of people going to jail for enslaving farm workers, picking tomatoes. How about that? Wow.

And what did that slavery look like? Because, you know, it's hard to imagine, would they be buying and selling people or what are they doing?

Well, I'll tell you, one of the cases In one of the cases they were, and this was of African Americans, primarily African American slavery, they were going into homeless shelters and saying to people who many of whom had intellectual disabilities, if you come with us, we'll give you food and shelter and a full time job. And people would got into this truck, which was basically a U-Haul with no windows, and they're driven five hours and dumped out in a tomato field and told you to pick tomatoes now 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And then they're not, you know, they're not.

And they weren't paid.

They're not paid. And they have no idea where they are, and they have no idea how to get out. That was one of the cases.

Wow.

Another case, it was of immigrants coming up from, you know, seasonal workers coming up across the Texas border looking for work. Yeah, we've got a full-time job for you. Just get on this bus. They go to Florida. Again, they're taken. Now, in that particular case, they had, I think It's like 24 people in one mobile home. And they show everybody binoculars and show them how binoculars work. And then they pistol whip a couple of the workers and say, and they've got guns. And they say, if any of you tries to leave, we're gonna shoot you. and we're gonna kill you. And we've got binoculars on you all day long. You go into this field more. And they were there for a year. The field adjoined a, what's the biggest bird watching association?

The Audubon Society.

Yeah, it adjoined an Audubon Society. They just saw tons of people with binoculars looking at them all day long. Wow. How about that? Can you imagine anyone from the Audubon Society thought those people were being enslaved and that they were being exploited? So that's what was happening. But what they did was they went to consumers.

Yeah.

And then they got consumers on board mostly on college campuses, starting in college campuses then generally. And then they went to the big buyers like McDonald's and Burger King and others, the fast food companies, and now Walmart. And they said, you have the danger of slavery in your fields. All you have to do is comply with the Fair Food Program and we will guarantee that you don't have the supply chain disruptions and that you're treating your people fairly. And so, you know, eventually almost all those companies came around with Wendy's is still holding out.

Publix, right? Publix? They can merge.

Publix as well. But Wendy's is a national chain, Publix is local to Florida. But basically, what the Fair Food Program does is it's a worker-driven social responsibility. So most social responsibility compacts are written by the CEO or the legal team or the marketing team. This is written by the workers. What do you need in order to feel safe? We need sanitation in the fields. We need to be able to wash our hands. We need to be paid from the moment we get on the bus, not the moment when we can start working in the field. All those types of things. Then they have an agreement that they'll train all of the workers in those fields. They do trainings once every about two months so that everybody knows their rights.

Yeah.

And knows how to report the abuses. And then they can, you know, and then the abuses continue to happen usually in a field for another year. But once everybody understands that they'll be held accountable for abuse, the abuse has stopped. And that's what they've been able to prove. So it's really effective.

Yeah, I mean, the Fair Food Program is pretty amazing because it really was generated from the workers. And in order for a company to say they are a Fair Food Purchaser and be part of that and get the credibility with the consumer, they have to agree to do these things, including paying a penny more per pound, which doesn't sound like very much, It doubles the wages of these farm workers. They did it without passing on that to the consumers. And the amazing provisions are things that we would all think are just something we should already have in America, like no forced labor, no child labor, no violence, minimum wage, paid workers for all their work, no sexual abuse. I mean, these are things that we all should expect. Freedom to report unsafe treatment, abuse, access to shade and clean water and, you know, just like things that we take for granted, most of us being transported in safe vehicles around rickety things that are going to fall apart and actually how to actually leave the field if there's pesticide spraying. I mean, I think the data from a doctor's point of view is so striking to me, Carrie, when you look at the ChemMACO study in Salinas, California, the chemical exposures from the pesticides, even though there were a lot of reforms California, there's still tremendous exposures. The workers there are 59% more likely to get leukemia, 70% more likely to get stomach cancer. They're more likely to get cervical cancer, 63%. And what's really striking is in breast milk. So these kids are really born pre-polluted. It's pretty scary. 40% more pesticides in the breast milk. These kids have neurological impairment. They lost 41 million IQ few points in this population. And they're using chemicals that are banned in most other countries like Atrazine, Paraquat, nitenanamides, and dichloropropane, which is one of the most harmful ones and most widely used in California. And it's like, wow, we're living in a democracy where equal rights and human justice are, I mean, we're all, we're like the, you know, the sort of, apparently the paragon of human rights. we call it all of these other countries. And it's terrible, especially in these workers. And your dad went out to meet Cesar Chavez in the '60s, and he was on a hunger strike and helped break the strike by getting the attention that was needed on their plate and made some real reforms. But when you look at the data today, I mean, when your dad was going down to the Mississippi Delta, 30% of African-Americans, 23% of Latinos lived in poverty compared to 8% of whites. And today, it's the same. It's about 26% of African Americans, 24% of Latinos, more, and 10% of whites. So in some ways, we've made progress, but in some ways, we haven't. So how do we go forward to sort of deal with these health and human rights inequities and economic disparities that are driving so much suffering? And we see it now, even Carrie, I think you're probably aware of the data, but Even COVID-19 is attacking these populations, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans. I mean, Chicago and Louisiana, African Americans are 30% of the population, but 70% of the deaths, right? And it's because of these structural violence and these inherent inequities in our society. So how do we begin to sort of change the narrative so people understand that we still have this in America and we still have communities where there's 20 or 30 years difference in life expectancy, depending on your zip code.

You know, it's like... Yeah, no, I'm so glad you're raising all those issues, Mark. And look, I think we have a... First of all, we're living in.

One.

Filmmaker 10 years ago called Idiocracy.

Oh yeah, I gotta see that film. Someone tell me about it.

I mean, you know, So, and we're living under a family that is completely corrupt and we've handed over our country to a group of mobsters. And what Jared Kushner did at the beginning of COVID is just handing all the contracts over to his friends and his cronies instead of to the bidders who could most likely help our country is just one example of it. So I think we can start there. We need to vote these guys out. The Republican Party, the RNC is putting $20 billion, B, not million, $20 billion in defending lawsuits for voter, for stopping voter registration drives and objections to voters' rights. So this is a group of people who does not want us to live in a democracy. And we have to be aware of that, aware of how they're stealing our right to vote and we have to fight against that. So that's one thing. I think one of the great.

You.

Know, Churchill said never let a good crisis go to waste and there's nothing good about COVID But I think people are becoming more aware of the, as you pointed out, the detrimental impacts of people who are living in poverty and people of color in our country. And how this is increasing those divides. And I think the other lining, silver linings of this is there's a much, much greater appreciation for family. There's a much greater appreciation for the need for community. And there's a much greater appreciation for connectedness with the Earth. People want to be outside. They want to be among trees and plants. They want to be with their friends and their. And so this is a moment. And there's also a kind of a spiritual Revival that's going on. of unity and of love and of gratitude for what we do have. So I think we need to harness that energy of community and of light to say we're all in this together and how do we reform our economic system? How do we build a vibrant and strong medical system, public health system, so that we can address all of these issues in a united way, not just for the United States, not just for the US and Europe and our usual allies, but for China and South Asia. What are the lessons that we can learn from South Korea? And we can learn from New Zealand that have shown us how to deal, grapple with these issues and how do we do this together as a united world?

Yeah, I think it's hard to imagine a silver lining in all this, but I think if we stop and think about what really matters, like the things you're talking about, we're going to realize we don't want to go back to normal. Normal wasn't so good. We want a new normal that incorporates a lot of these issues. And I do have some hope because I see the bipartisan legislation that is the relief packages that is coming out. And there's problems with them for sure. But there is a sense of, okay, we have to step up and we have to create a safety net for our society and we have to help our citizens and we have to protect them. And I think even though it's done in a clunky way, It's sort of amazing to me that in Washington, which seems so intractably broken, that there is movement and it's quick and it's helping in small ways. So I think I have hope. I'm always an optimist. I don't know if it's justified or not. Although I do see there are dark forces and I think there's dark money and I think we have to be aware of how to focus on bringing back our democracy. And I think the story is like you told like the Mockley workers and other efforts that the RFK Human Rights is doing is so compelling. And I just sort of reminded of that famous speech your father gave in South Africa, which you talked about in our Robert F. Kennedy Ripples of Hope, your book, which everybody should get, 'cause it's very inspiring. He said, each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against justice. He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring. And those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. And I sort of get chills every time I read that. And I think it sort of been the guiding light for me. He also liked to quote George Bernard Shaw, which I love that quote, which is an amazing an inspiring quote, which is some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream of things that never were and say, why not? And so despite all the obstacles and all the challenges we face and all the dark forces that are arrayed against us, I think there's a lot of light. And I think, you know, we have to keep focusing on that. And I think this is a moment where it's calling us to attention. You know, part of me thinks this is God giving humanity a time out. Go to your room, you know, think about what you're doing. and how to change it. And so maybe you can speak a little bit about the themes that you.

Talk about in Ripple of Hope and.

How that influences you and the work of the RFK Human Rights and also your life.

Well, thanks. So in RFK Ripples at the Hope, I interviewed people who have made a difference on the world stage and who were inspired by Robert Kennedy. so people like Tim Cook, Tony Bennett, a wide range of people, John Lewis and others, and Dolores Huerta. You know, the thing that came out of that book or became crystallized for me is that the essential thing to know about my dad was about his moral imagination. And that really, that saved us, that was his ability to understand things from the other person's point of view and do it with compassion and love. And I think that's what saved us from nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis when, you know, the the military-industrial complex was really marching Jack, Uncle Jack, to war.

Otherwise known as President Kennedy.

And saying you have to drop a bomb on Cuba. But Uncle Jack didn't want to do that. And meanwhile, Krushchev was giving all these very war-mongering speeches. But my father put, he doesn't want to go to war either. He's also got that same group of people on his side who are saying, you gotta go to war. And so they started a secret back channel of communications.

It was your dad who was that communicator, right?

Exactly, yeah.

The Russian ambassador.

Exactly. You got it, Mark. Exactly. And so they were able to come together and realize that there was a way forward and that if the two leaders could talk, they could get us to peace. That same, that was the same tactic my dad used when Martin Luther King died on April 4, 1968. Daddy was campaigning in Indiana and his plane landed in Indianapolis. and he got a call from the mayor of Indianapolis, white mayor Richard Lugar at that time, who said, you,'re supposed to go and give a speech at a rally in the largest African-American neighborhood in Indianapolis. You can't go because already 125 cities have started rioting and looting and burning across our country with the news about Martin Luther King and it's too dangerous. And let me just remind you that Dover Delaware was in martial law for nine months after April 4th. Wow. No, I mean, people think it was bad then, it was really violent and scary. And my father said, and, and Luger said, you can't go there. And even if you do go there, I want to allow my police to go with you because it's too dangerous for my guts and I'm not going to put them in harm's way. My father said, With all due respect, Mr. Mayer, you might not be able to go there, but I have worked with that community for years and years. And I could go there tonight with my pregnant wife and my 10 children. Nothing would happen to them. And he went.

There's a word we use for that in Judaism. It's called chutzpah.

The front of the crowd had been waiting for this before cell phones had been waiting for him for hours and they hadn't heard a word. Back to the crowd people had heard about Hank. And they came with Molotov cocktails and bicycle chains and they were ready to riot. And my father got up and he just spoke spontaneously he said, I have some very bad news for you. Martin Luther King has been shot and killed tonight. And he said, you know, for those of you who are angered by the injustice of this act and tempted towards violence, I can say I understand that feeling because I had a member of my family who was killed by a white man with a gun. Now, try and imagine somebody running for president, talking to a crowd, ready to riot and saying, I understand your feelings.

Yeah.

I mean, just impossible, right? And then he went on to say that what we need in the United States is not division and violence and lawlessness, but justice and a sense of compassion towards those who still suffer in our country, whether they do black or they're white. And then he urged people to go home and say a prayer for the King family and a prayer for our country. And that night, Indianapolis was peaceful and the rest of the country burned.

Yeah.

And so that, that's what we need in our country today. We need that leadership. We need that vision. We need that, that self-confidence to stand up and to go into the danger zone, but to do it with. With compassion and love and openness to the pain of others.

Yeah.

And, you know, that's. That's. That's not what we've got up at the top, but we do have it in other places, and I think. I think people's instinct is to say, there's nothing I can do. What can I do? I don't have the power. I'm not the president. I'm not a senator. I'm not a governor. But there's stuff we can do. Some things you can do. Some people just getting out of bed in the morning, you did that. Yeah. Congratulations. That's the same thing. You did it. And then do something nice. Go wash the dishes, you know? Yeah. Give blood. All these hospitals need blood now. Call the blood bank. See if you can give blood. Do something. Do something for someone else. That's how you feel empowered. That's how you're no longer a victim. Do something for somebody in your life.

And that's so much of what your family's done. It's been in service for the last, I don't know, 60, 70, 80 years. I don't know, in a long time. And I just interviewed a Yale professor, Laurie Santos, who was talking about happiness. And one of the best ways to actually activate your own happiness is by serving others. And there are biological reasons for it. And I think, you know, it's easy to think of me and mine and what I have to do to protect all that. But it turns out that, you know, we're all this together and that by standing up for what matters, whether it's a small Injustice or a large Injustice, actually helps us be happier and be a better contribution to our families and our lives. And it's, it's such a great example that your families put forth. And I think that inspires me every day. And I, I think about how can, how can I, you know, add to those ripples that are out there in the world? And it's, it's something that I hope everybody takes from this conversation, because you don't have to be a policy maker or run a big company, but you actually can make a difference. And it's those small little acts, those little ripples that make all the difference. So thank you, Carrie. This is an amazing conversation and I continue to be inspired by you and the work of the RFK Human Rights for so long. And in the work that you're doing, you're not only doing this here in America, but around the world and you're training others how to do this. your work has just touched so many lives and so many people and it continues to do that. And I just really honor you and thank you for this amazing work.

Thanks, Mark, sending you a cyber hug.

Yeah, yeah, a COVID hug, right? So, yeah, so if you, one last question, if you were president or queen or in charge, you know, what were the things you would start with to change, to deal with? what's going on today in the world to create a more just and humane world for us all.

Mark, if you asked me that a couple years ago, I would say empower women, because across the board, the one thing that has been proven to really, really change things most immediately is when women are empowered. Women are educated, women have more, say, corporations who are in government, et cetera.

That's, you know, I don't know.

But I have something else instead.

Okay, okay.

Before you go to the next thing, I just want to say most people don't realize this, but most of the countries now that have successfully controlled COVID-19 are run by women, like New Zealand or Germany, right?

Well, Germany, let's just say Germany among the Europeans is doing better, but it's nowhere close to New Zealand or South Korea or South Asia. So we need to look more closely at South Asia. Absolutely. Anyway, the thing that I would say today, if there's one thing I could do to dramatically impact human rights environments all the issues, poverty that we care about for the next generation is I would dramatically increase the emotional IQ of the next generation. And we can do that through social-emotional learning. And that's one of the things RFK Human Rights is doing now. We're teaching Our education materials go to about 54 million students each year, kindergarten through law school, on human rights and social-emotional learning. But if we can increase people's moral imagination, the way we deal with each other, the way we walk through life, our own inner spiritual selves, our gratitude, our love of beauty, our joy, That's what's really going to make the difference. I couldn't agree more and I want.

To know, when are you announcing your candidacy for President of the United States? Because I would vote for you. That is what America needs. And I think if we did have more of that moral imagination and emotional intelligence, this would be a very different world. And you're right, we have to start with our kids and we neglect them in that way, in a way that I think borders on abuse in this country. And I feel like we have a moment where we can wake up to that.

That.

I just thank you. That is an amazing call to action.

All righty, Mark, good to be with you.

Good to be with you. Okay, thank you and thank you for listening to Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this conversation, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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