1968 VIDEO: Robert F. Kennedy’s “Mindless Menace of Violence” speech

1968 VIDEO: Robert F. Kennedy’s “Mindless Menace of Violence” speech

I have struggled to choose just one sentence or phrase from this speech for the topic of this blog. Should I discuss the "shattered dreams" of some which others use to "build their own lives"? RFK asks us all to recognize our own faults so that we can learn and build so that we can live "in purpose and in happiness" - his idealistic vision seems so real -- so possible in this speech that it hurts my heart when I think that it was given decades ago and while much has changed -- fear, violence, frustration, hunger and revenge have remained. Still, his words insprire me to strive for change. I sometimes think I admire RFK so much because he was Irish-American. When I was about 13, I started to get to know my father again and I found one of the safest topics to discuss was our lineage. It was distant, but still a connection between us. I grasped on to our Irish background and read anything I could find about the Irish in America. I spouted anecdotes to anyone who would listen. I sang Irish songs. I had a dad. He was Irish. I was Irish. I belonged to something. But maybe the connection to RFK is more than that. My father was a hippie. Not just a wear sandals and listen to the Grateful Dead kind of hippie. [Don't get me wrong, he still wears tie dye and listens to Zappa.] I like to think of him as the action hippie. Or maybe the non action hippie. He was drafted for Vietnam and used this to protest violence by refusing to pick up his gun. He was court martialed and -- it's a story for another time. The point is, I see now that he shares with RFK the belief that "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." I think it took my father some time [and a new wife] to realize that his daughter was also part of this nation. That his prolonged absences and unpredictable returns to my life were not weaving us closer together. I think of T.S. Eliot's words, "There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions" - a chance to mend the threads of our relationship which have been streteched thin time and time again, but now secure us as father and daughter. We have, in Kennedy's words a "bond in common faith, this bond in common goal" -- faith in ourselves, our family, in humanity and a goal to "bind up the wounds among us."