On the Mindless Menace of Violence
Delivered by Robert F. Kennedy, City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this
one opportunity, my only event 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 violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s
cause has ever been stilled by an 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 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.
“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 lost 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 whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and 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 non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home.
Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
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.
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.
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 know 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 brothers 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 not 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
humane 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 others. 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 vanquish it with a
program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are
our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek,
as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in 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 own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.