Only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul 2

Since the weather wasn’t adequate enough to partake in any outdoor activities today, Han and I watched the movie “Bobby“; a film written and directed by Emilio Estivez that revolves around the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought it was a really good movie and I think you should watch it. (Despite the mediocre reviews).

It really made me think about what kind of world we would live in if the Kennedy brothers weren’t assassinated. To me these men were the last true leaders in the United States and they had a vision to make the U.S. a better country and to make the world a better place. They fought alongside the great Martin Luther King Jr. for equality, peace and social justice. RFK was the last of these great men to be assassinated at the helm of crazy men with guns. It’s no accident that a JFK quote has stayed the left side of this site for the last couple months.

Where would we be right now if JFK wasn’t shot, or if RFK became President instead of being assassinated? Why do all the greats have to die young? In present-day America, we still see the same problems that these men fought against, except now it’s Muslims and Mexicans instead of Black people.

Here are two quotes from RFK that I found on the RFK Memorial:

“And there was not only the violence of the shot in the night. Slower but just as deadly, [Martin Luther King Jr.] said, was ‘the violence of institutions….This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger…the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among men.’ So much at least was clear: ‘Violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.'”

What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.