I am absolutely a sucker for great speeches. Even the didactic and proselytic ones. And while I normally wouldn't share something so pedagogic publicly (blips and excerpts of speeches are usually skittered across emails amongst my friends), I found that revisiting two specific speeches served as a quiet reprieve from the recent events in Missouri and New York (and really, everywhere in the United States since...ever).
The two speeches are Robert F Kennedy's announcement of MLK's assassination and a mere 63 days later, Ted Kennedy's eulogy for RFK following his assassination.
I will keep this short because the beauty really is in the words themselves, with little need for commentary.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will-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 white people and the vast majority of black 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.
Thanks Dan, for the timely reminder of these words.