On Mindless Menace of Violence

Robert Kennedy's Speech at Cleveland, Ohio April 5, 1968


On Mindless Menace of Violence


"Mr Chairmen,Ladies And Gentlemen

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? 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.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lost their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

Unconditional Love

Unconditional Love

It's easier these days, and yet it's much harder these days.
In a society with drugs, abuse, violence... how easy is it to be unconditionally loving?

Better yet, can you be unconditionally loving?

It's easy towards your spouse, family and friends even... Because you know them, you know what moves them and what angers them.

What about a mean drunk on the side of the road?
Yes, that is a lot harder. You can know he's just as much a part of god as you are, but still you and him have a unique difference and a unique similarity.
He (or she) hasn't come to grip with his emotions, troubles, ideas and was slugged aside like an old wash cloth and wasn't capable of coping with it.

You have had those moments of being slugged away too, but you coped.
It's in your blueprint that you can cope.

I think that aplies really well to all the unlovable in this world, the robbers, murderers, pedophiles, rapists, drunks, drug abusers... all of them at one point let go of the wheel. So how did they survive the horrible crash then.
God/Creator/Higher Power. Yes, still loved by god. (and if we are a part of god what does it mean?)
If there is no struggle we do not know how great we have it... true and not true.

Those people who's blueprints have these cruel fates are the ones who have to fullfill that karma... and by fullfilling that karma they help other people learn about themselves, and so on and so on...

Let's take as an example:

A woman is robbed and killed on the street, her family and friends moarn her, discover new things about this woman, things they never knew. They have to cry, they have to rage, they have to learn to be a whole person again. It takes a huge amount of time, a great effort from their body and soul to learn what they came here to learn.

A violent death can be in your blueprint. Maybe to pay off your karma, maybe to teach your loved ones what is loss, and pain and how to cope with it.

One death effect so many, the more public the death, more people are effected by it.

One could even compare the celebrity craze to this.
Why is the world so obsessed?

Well how many young people learn about battle with anorexia, drugs, mental problems?
A huge amount of young people!
It's like taking a magnifying glass on life lesson and multiplying it by millions.
It is a craze and it is a great blueprint by god.

Even hollywood isn't the empty, black hole of corruption... but on one angle actually the magnifying glass of learning for those who otherwise might have to wait a whole life time to learn a certain life lesson.

Think of local classes and universal classes.

I got off track a bit.

So Unconditional Love, is unconditional, you just have to know why things got to it, how the only thing you can control is your reaction and your knowledge.

You don't have to hug drunk, or go smile to a pedophile(or smack their teeth in).
But you need to know that Everything happens for a reason, karma does exist, you cannot escape thing by pushing them away in to the back of your mind. (that may lead a a life of "those" we been talking about)

Unconditionally love Life, as a whole, it has it's purpose, you have your purpose, "they" have their purpose.
You could not learn what you have to in this life, if "they" weren't here to learn their lessons.

We are all connected.