WORDS OF WISDOM

Robert Kennedy

It is simple to follow the easy and familiar path of person ambition and private gain. It is more comfortable to sit content in the easy approval of friends and of neighbors than to risk the friction and the controversy that comes with public affairs. It is easier to fall in step with the slogans of others than to march to the beat of the internal drummer - to make and stand on judgments of your own. And it is far easier to accept and to stand on the past, than to fight for the answers of the future.

[From a memoir of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.]
He has called on the best that was in us. There was no such thing as half-trying. Whether it was running a race or catching a football, competing in school - we were to try. And we were to try harder than anyone else. We might not be the best, and none of us were, but we were to make the effort to be the best. "After you have done the best you can," he used to say, "the hell with it."

[During one of RFK's speeches, a student in the crowd asked, "Where are you going to get all the money for these federally subsidized programs you're talking about?"]
From you. Let me say something about the tenor of that question and some of the other questions. There are people in this country who suffer. I look around this room and I don't see many black faces who are going to be doctors. You can talk about where the money will come from...Part of civilized society is to let people to go to medical school who come from ghettos. You don't see many people coming out of the ghettos or off the Indian reservations to medical school. You are the privileged ones here. It's easy to sit back and say it's the fault of the federal government, but it's our responsibility, too. It's our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much on pets as on the poverty program. It's the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.

The great French marshal [Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve] Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for one hundred years. The marshal replied, "In that case, there's no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon."

All of us, from the wealthiest to the young children that I have seen in this country, in this year, bloated by starvation - we all share one precious possession, and that is the name American. It is not easy to know what that means. But in part to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger, to have come to the exiles' country, and to know that he who denies the outcast and stranger still amongst us, he also denies America.

John Adams once said that he considered the founding of America part of "a divine plan for the liberation of the slavish part of mankind all over the globe." This faith did not spring from grandiose schemes of empires abroad. It grew instead from confidence that the example set by our nation - the example of individual liberty around the planet; and that once unleashed, no despot could suppress it, no prison could restrain it, no army could withstand it.

Jefferson Davis once came to Boston, and he addressed his audience in Faneuil Hall as "countrymen, brethren, Democrats." Rivers of blood and years of darkness divide that day from this. But those words echo down to this hall, bringing the lesson that only as countrymen and as brothers can we hope to master and subdue to the service of mankind the enormous forces which rage across the world in which all of us live. And only in this way can we pursue our personal talents to the limits of our possibility - not as Northerners or Southerners, blacks or whites, but as men and women in the service of the American dream.

No citizen can escape from freedom and still enjoy it.

We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.

Freedom means not only the opportunity to know but the will to know.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason, and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society. It will belong to those who see that wisdom can only emerge from the clash of contending views, the passionate expression of deep and hostile beliefs.
Plato said: "A life without criticism is not worth living."

There are millions of Americans living in hidden places, whose faces and names we never know. But I have seen children starving in Mississippi, idling their lives away in the ghetto, living without hope or future amid the despair on Indian reservations, with no jobs and little hope. I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity - but the mines are closed, and the jobs are gone, and no one, neither industry or labor or government, has cared enough to help. Those conditions will change, those children will live, only if we dissent. So I dissent, and I know you do, too.

Suppose God Is Black.

But this is not all the young man of the ghetto can see. Every day, as the years pass, and he becomes aware that there is nothing at the end of the road, he watches the rest of us go from peak to new peak of comfort. A few blocks away or in his television set, the young Negro of the slums sees the multiplying marvels of white America: more new cars and more summer vacations, more air-conditioned homes and neatly kept lawns. But he cannot buy them.

Among Negro youth we can sense, in their alienation, a frustration so terrible, an energy and determination so great, that it must find constructive outlet or result in unknowable danger for us all. This alienation will be reduced to reasonable proportions, in the end, only by bringing the Negro into his rightful place in this nation. But we must work to try and understand, to speak and touch across the gap, and not leave their voices of protest to echo unheard in the ghetto of our ignorance.

The brutalities of Selma, and its denial of elementary rights of citizenship, were condemned throughout the North; and thousands of white Northerners went there to march to Montgomery. But the many brutalities of the North receive no such attention. I have been in tenements in Harlem in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children sleep with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks....Thousands do not flock to Harlem to protest these conditions - much less to change them.

[The day after Martin Luther King died RFK gave this speech:]
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only even 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 this violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's case has ever been still by his 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 the only 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.

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.

Our great problem is sheer growth - growth which crowds people into slums, thrusts suburbs out over the countryside, burdens to the breaking point all our old ways of thought and action, our systems of transport and water supply and education, and our means of raising money to finance these vital services.
A second is destruction of the physical environment, stripping people of contact with sun and fresh air, clean rivers, grass, and trees - condemning them to a life among stone and concrete, neon lights and an endless flow of automobiles. This happens not only in the central city, but in the very suburbs where people once fled to find nature....
A third is the increasing difficult of transportation, adding concealed, unpaid hours to the workweek; removing men from the social and cultural amenities that are the heart of the city; sending destructive swarms of automobiles across the city, leaving behind them a band of concrete and a poisoned atmosphere....
A fourth destructive force is the concentrated poverty and racial tension of the urban ghetto, a problem so vast that the barest recital of its symptoms is profoundly shocking...
Fifth is both cause and consequence of all the rest. It is the destruction of the sense, and often the face of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect, which tie men to their fellows. It is expressed in such words as community, neighborhood, civic pride, friendship. It provides the life-sustaining force of human warmth, of security among others, and a sense of one's human significance in the accepted associations and companionship of others.

If we cannot feed the children of our nation, there is very little we will be able to succeed in doing to live up to the principles which our founders set out nearly two hundred years ago.

Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

The Golden Rule is not sentimentality but the deepest practical wisdom. For the teaching of our time is that cruelty is contagious, and its disease knows no bounds of race or nation. Where men can be deprived because their skin is black, in the fullness of time others will be deprived because their skin is white.

"Some people," he said, "see things and say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were and I say, 'Why not?' " - George Bernard Shaw, quoted by RFK.
[RFK often finished his stump speech with these words, and the reporters who followed the campaign used it as their cue to head back to their buses. Once, he changed the ending to "I say, 'Run for the bus.' "]

And so we argued and so we disagreed - all dedicated, intelligent men, disagreeing and fighting about the future of their country, and of mankind. Meanwhile, time was slowly running out.

People are just sick of politicians. And they are looking...for just an honest man.

There go the people - I must hurry and catch up with them, for I am their leader.

Look through the eyes of the young slum-dweller - the Negro, the Puerto Rican, the Mexican American - at the dark and hopeless world he sees....

On his television set, the young man can still watch the multiplying marvels of white America; the commercials still tell him life is impossible without the latest products of our consumer society.

All this goes on.

But he still cannot buy them.

How overwhelming must be the frustration of this young man - this young American - who, desperately wanting to believe and half believing, finds himself still locked in the slums, his education second rate, unable to get a job confronted by the open prejudice and subtle hostilities of a white world, and powerless to change his condition or even have an effect on his future.

Others still tell him to work his way up as other minorities have done; and so he must.

For he knows, and we know, that only his own efforts and his own labor will he come to full equality.

But how is he to work?

(from To Seek a Newer World)

Source: Make Gentle The Life Of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy.
[thanks, Jules, for letting me borrow it]