Music is often my spring board for inspiration. Sometimes the songs don't lead me into much more than just entertaining tracks.
This song a bit more than that.
I've heard it before. But as with many songs, sometimes the lyrics don't strike a chord or you don't hear them a certain way until by some chance, randomly it seems, they click.
And when they click. Wow. They click. Maybe this was the first time that the sample from the speech really clicked.
"Let us 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."
Like I mentioned my framework of reference for that quote was a weak shade of gray. Many people probably knew instantly the reference. It took me a few minutes of digging to find it. and the full speech.
And before getting to that one I hit me was his Mindless Menace of Violence:
No, i never saw the movie "Bobby.
Listened to that... before hitting on his speech from Thursday, April 4th, 1968.
It struck me all in that I wonder, really wonder, if RFK's assassination wasn't this country's "A Sound of Thunder."
Certainly the Kennedy family isn't well loved by all, a bunch of bleeding heart silverspoon liberals. But some how, it seems, this one, Bobby, was different. Maybe he wasn't. I don't know his whole story, just the headlines. Just his speeches.
His compassion doesn't seem fake to me. here over 40 years after his death, what would he say about this place, this country that he loved.
Would we have had to send friends like Eric Marro to Iraq? We are all grateful and fortunate that he came home and it is with a great bit of honor that we should remember Feb 7th in his honor and those who he fought with and for. There may just have been a different conflict, but maybe no conflict. Again, living in the past is only good if you can take it and use it to set a course for the future. Reflecting on the past helps illuminate a course.
I could tie it into food, but time is now threatening my conclusion. Not that I have one, other than maybe it is worth introspecting a bit on that RFK guy, and realizing how little progress we are making in this country towards compassion (can anyone say health care for all?) peace (using bullseye targets to identify "liberal" problems) and the rest...
I will close with this quote from RFK:
"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 the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter."
ah hell one more:
"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."
heddwch
G
