Robert Kennedy’s Assassination:

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.

Why?  What has violence ever accomplished?  What has it ever
created?  No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled 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 only the voice of madness, not the voice of the
people.

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 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 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 lose 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 weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the 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 nonviolence
abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of
inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this
much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation,
and only a cleaning 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 a 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 known 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 bothers 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 now 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 human 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
all. 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 vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those
who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same
short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the
chance to live out their lives in purpose and 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 hearts
brothers and countrymen once again.