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But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favor
by themgt 1y ago
But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country ...
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of [people] in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Bobby Kennedy, 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0
- rawgabbit 1y ago[flagged]
- bb88 1y ago[flagged]
- kragen 1y agoAs long as some of us are still alive, violence hasn't won.
- bb88 1y agoLife can be made worth unlivable.
- hamhock666 1y ago> Slavery was only ended by violence I don't think this is quite true, it may have ended it faster, but I don't think it would still exist today if the civil war had not happened. Most other countries ended slavery without a violent civil war, especially if you think about the way technology vastly outweighed the usefulness of having slaves. And then when Charlie Kirk says "Some deaths were worth it...", he is talking about accidents and abuses of guns by shooters. He doesn't mean that violence is the answer to politics, it would be great if nobody died from mass shootings. But he is saying that having the right to bear arms to defend yourself is preferable to the alternative where you have no right to do that.
- buildsjets 1y ago[flagged]
- DetroitThrow 1y ago[flagged]
- cshores 1y ago[flagged]
- miltonlost 1y ago[flagged]
- bb88 1y ago
- rKarpinski 1y ago> Bobby Kennedy made that speech, was assassinated shortly afterwards, and Nixon won, prolonging the Vietnam War for another 6 years. Bobby Kennedy, also made a historic speech in Indianapolis that quelled rioting after the MLK assassination You are talking about the same speech. It was a great speech
- bb88 1y agoI mistyped that, and it was. It was a great speech.
- mmastrac 1y agoSpeech made in April, 1968, assassinated on June 5, 1968. Wild.
- bamboozled 1y agoTragic, what a waste.
- ethbr1 1y ago>> Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! [April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee] Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. So perhaps a better excerpt in light of recent events would be >> And another reason that I'm happy to live in [the second half of the 20th century] is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
- yakz 1y agoIt turns out, at least so far, we can still choose violence.
- ethbr1 1y agoHis point was that once the physical power individuals/governments hold exceeds a threshold, a pluralistic society cannot coexist with violence being an acceptable option. In the context of the 1960s, governments and nuclear weapons. But more broadly the same holds true for individuals. Either we learn to live together despite our differences, or we use our newfound great power to annihilate each other.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tmsh 1y agoThe most sustainable vision wins. And this is a great vision. Thanks for posting. Helped clarify how to think about today.
- thrance 1y agoThe most sustainable vision wins eventually. If history has anything to teach us, is that it's full of extremely unpleasant periods between the stable ones. And things aren't looking like they're improving.
- chris_wot 1y agoIf that's the case, then the most sustainable vision gradually devolves into unsustainability.
- thrance 1y agoThat's what's happening. Neoliberalism is slowly drifting into fascism, as it has already done multiple times in the past. Maybe what comes after will be actually stable, and not just metastable.
- ahartmetz 1y ago[flagged]
- dudefeliciano 1y ago"democracy leads to fascism leads to war" - just watched the movie Eden by Ron Howard
- goshdangit 1y agoAnd that vision can be dark or realistic.
- Palomides 1y ago[flagged]
- bdangubic 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- otterley 1y agoCorrection: hate unchecked and amplified by social media wins elections. David Duke and Pat Buchanan, both notorious racists (the former being Grand Wizard of the KKK), ran for President but the mainstream media (which were once the only media most people consumed) constrained their influence.
- bagels 1y agoThat isn't happening anymore, and now we also have social media.
- notmyjob 1y agoThere is both Eros and Thanatos. Everything ad based (social media, evening news, YouTube, Reddit, elections) turns towards Thanatos ultimately. They used to put hidden images of skulls and other dark and dangerous subliminal symbology in whiskey ads back in 70s. Sex sells, maybe, but if it bleeds it leads.
- causal 1y agoSource?
- underlipton 1y ago[flagged]
- lossolo 1y agoThat would be a great world if that vision could materialize. But as long as people continue polarizing society, exploiting emotions, and using divide and conquer[1] tactics to gain political power, not much will change, and things may even get worse. Social networks have amplified this dynamic more than ever before. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer
- armchairhacker 1y agoThere is hope. GP is currently the highest comment, and on other sites I've visited, while too many people cheer this or call for violent retaliation, most of the highly-upvoted comments (both liberal and conservative) condemn it and argue for de-escalation. Anger and fear are powerful emotions, but so is hope. Barack Obama campaigned on hope and became President, winning his first election with the highest %votes since 1988. Donald Trump also became President in part due to hope; his supporters expected him to improve their lives, while most of Hillary Clinton's and Kamala Harris's supporters just expected them to not make things worse. Now lots of people desperately need hope, and if things get worse more will. Irrational hope can be dangerous: all the time, people make decisions that backfire horribly, and deep down they knew those decisions would backfire horribly, but they made them anyways out of desperation for an unlikely success. Perhaps this is another example, where the assassin delusionally hoped it would somehow promote and further their desires, but it will almost certainly do the opposite. But hope can also be rational, and unlike anger and fear (which at best prevent bad things), hope can intrinsically be for causing good things. If a group or candidate that runs on hope for a better world gets enough attention and perceived status, it could turn public perception back to unity and optimism.
- nobodywillobsrv 1y agoHave we considered that the assassin, directly or indirectly, is a seditious third party actor trying to destabilize the US? I am not claiming this is true. But merely that if I was employed to destabilize the US, I would claim to have been responsible for a number of recent events in order to please my boss. I am hoping the possibility of a joint common enemy can perhaps unite people in America a bit.
- rickydroll 1y agoThanks, this is what I needed to hear.
- scrubs 1y agoAeschylus is a great greek poet. For our purposes here I might advocate for Jung (paraphrasing from memory) In the end there is no going forward in the current context; there are no solutions there. It requires renewed vigor to move to a higher, better frame where growth is possible. For us americans: political identity (libs v. Trump) has no solutions. Better: the political parties need to serve us. Dead kids or abused kids by adults (Epstein) cannot stand. What can 3.5 std deviations of center left and right get together over? Kids surely. And the knowledge (as Aeschylus narrates well elsewhere with the furies) that violence begets violence surely.
- AbstractH24 1y agoWhile I like that quote, i just went to lookup the speach and was sadden to learn you “sanitized” it. Taking out the phrase “vast majority of white people and vast majority of black people” That too says something about our times. Maybe a few things. From being unable to trust things without verifying, to people’s willingness to alter the truth to make a point, to how people fear discussing race and gender loud even in passing.
- Fluorescence 1y agoAnd the "those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black" which has always stuck in my mind because of the iconic phrasing. Frankly I find creating an analogue between the death of MLK and Kirk in bad taste only magnified by scrubbing race from an MLK tribute. Kirk would have celebrated MLK's death as he did the Pelosi hammer attack. Kirk called MLK "awful" and "not a good person" and the Civil Rights Movement "a huge mistake.". https://www.wired.com/story/charlie-kirk-tpusa-mlk-civil-rights-act/ https://www.wired.com/story/charlie-kirk-tpusa-mlk-civil-rig...
- fawkesalbus 1y agoRemoving the black and white people part makes it more relevant to the current times when it is not just black and white people but non negligible numbers of Hispanics, first peoples, Asians, Arabs and other minorities.
- dragonwriter 1y agoThere were non-negligible numbers of those people in MLK, Jr’s time, too. That has nothing to do with why he talked about white and black. EDIT: It’s particularly funny to imagine that First peoples somehow only became a thing in America sometime after Dr. King’s time.
- AbstractH24 1y agoBut advocating for the struggles of one group and not another shouldn’t make one bad. The whole idea of intersectionality makes it hard to build coalitions and turns everything into a problem that’s impossibly complex to solve and difficult to build a coalition around. It’s the basic reason many leaders who the majority of a country dislike rise to power. Because that majority can’t put their differences aside.
- hintymad 1y ago> what we need in the United States is not hatred What saddens me is people take different political views as hatred, and medias run with it. I can't remember how many times a person is labeled fascist or communist just because their views are different.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> What saddens me is people take different political views as hatred Some political views are hatred, and ignoring that doesn’t serve any useful purpose.
- istjohn 1y agoKirk didn't deserve to die for having or expressing hateful ideas, but his views were not merely "different." Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0]. And [1]: > America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that. And [1]: > The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different. 0. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-charlie-kirk https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha... 1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
- tempaccountabcd 1y ago[dead]
- alsetmusic 1y agoThe people crying fascist are sometimes correct. The people crying communist genuinely seem to think it applies to Democrats. Democrats are a center-right party by European standards. There's a side that is genuinely, factually, deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis and it plugs into Fox News. This isn't a political statement. It's documented up and down.
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- pyuser583 1y agoA nitpicky note: Aeschylus didn't say that. RFK probably studied Aeschylus in the original Greek, and did an on-the-fly translation. A more literal translation is: "Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our will temperance comes. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace is somehow violent." There's no "turning the other cheek here." It claims violence does indeed beget violence, and there's no human way around that. To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, or even criticizing RFK. I'm simply defending the purity of Aeschylus.