By Zamboni
We cats are now willing to show our age. We would like to comment on the California Parole Board's decision to recommend RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan for release.
It's hard for us to approach this story without emotion. Robert Kennedy, for all his faults, was on the road to clinching the Democratic nomination for President in 1968 when he was killed — and if he had beaten Richard Nixon in November, the country would be a much different place than it is today. Just think: a withdrawal from Vietnam, no bombing of Cambodia and Laos, no Watergate. The mind reels.
Most of Kennedy's surviving children have issued a statement opposing Sirhan's parole. "Sirhan Sirhan committed a crime against our nation and its people. He took our father from our family, and he took him from America," they said. Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy Jr., who is already a nut on vaccines, appears to differ. We don't care.
Why? Because the majority of Bobby's kids got it right. Sirhan robbed us of an RFK presidency. In the tumult that was 1968, RFK was the only one who understood where America's identity was. Here's what he said on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated.
"In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are Black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — Black people amongst Black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
"Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
"For those of you who are Black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.
"I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: '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 or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be Black."
Robert Kennedy spoke these words in Indianapolis that night. While multiple cities erupted into violence in the wake of the King assassination, Indianapolis was quiet. We cats PURR.
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