by Frank James
Forty years ago today, some of us thought the world must be about to end. Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Coming as it did only a few months after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, surely, it must be the end of days. At least that's the way it felt to a forlorn kid walking the streets of the Bronx.
There have been many calamities since then and the world obviously is still with us.
But even with all the tragedies over all the decades, the heart hasn't hardened so much that I can look at the footage from that Los Angeles night in 1968 and not be deeply saddened by what Sirhan Sirhan did in that Ambassador Hotel pantry.
Historian and Kennedy-family friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tells us that after President John Kennedy was killed, RFK sought to make sense of what happened through reading.
A passage from Aeschylus made a profound impression on him, so much so, RFK quoted it during a speech to a crowd in Indianapolis in the hours following King's murder:
"In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
RFK's death, for millions of us still, is the pain that cannot forget. Maybe it made us wiser, though most days it doesn't feel like it.
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Comments
If we could have learned one thing from the tragic losses of President Kennedy, Doctor Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, by way of assassinations, I hoped it would be that violence begets violence, unless in defense of liberty !! Unfortunately, leaders around the world continue to be assassinated, from Israel to Pakistan !! How can a nation's citizens turn away from violence, when that nation can't turn away from its use, for some spurious justifications !! Iraq is a classic example !!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE AND WHOLE. NOW.
Posted by: Don Fitzgerald, Chicago | June 5, 2008 4:21 PM
This is beautifully written
Posted by: hildy johnson | June 5, 2008 5:58 PM
Yes, this is beautifully written, and I was a child on the streets of Philadelphia, part of the volunteer 'lunch brigade' that took sandwiches to the marchers on my bicycle.
I didn't ride my beloved bike anywhere, though, on the 6th, 7th, or 8th of June that year; tears were in the way.
Not the end of the world for me. Just the end of all trust in adults to guide the world I was growing up into.
Posted by: Nora | June 5, 2008 10:23 PM
Is Anne Coulter, the Republican heroine, still trying to claim that RFKs killer was a Muslim? You Rightwingers will believe anything she says.
Posted by: jackson | June 6, 2008 9:51 AM
This was indeed a tragedy, and those who exploited the pain caused by it to score cheap political points against Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves.
Posted by: Tabitha | June 14, 2008 4:52 AM