Forty Years Ago Today – With Video
Tweet
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.
 |
|