and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there

If we think about it, it isn't only a "global economy, it's now a "global community."


America has to set a good example for others -- in the 1960s there was this phrase, "The whole world is watching."  I'm not sure the origin -- (the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago?) but you would hear that statement borrowed and re-applied...it's much more true now than then:  the "whole world" IS watching, & it is not hyperbole or exaggeration, it is more literally true.


We can't have any more police shooting people.  Because if we did, those desperate, mixed-up, misinformed terrorists will look at that on the Internet and say,


"Look!


Look over there in America!
Look what they do!
They do the same things as we do, only while wearing different outfits...!"


__________________________________


1968.


------------- [excerpt] ------------On June 5, 1968, just after he declared victory over Gene McCarthy in the crucial California primary, Kennedy was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, purportedly by a lone assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan....The nation was in complete disbelief; the nightmare of Dallas had returned. ...


Within hours, the Johnson White House was preparing talking points for a televised presidential address to the nation.  Press Secretary George Reedy advised LBJ that he should stress two points above all. 


"The greatest immediate danger arising out of the attempted assassination of Senator Kennedy is the rapidly developing sense of national guilt and the feeling that there is a 'sickness in our society.' . . .


The danger of the 'sickness in our society' thesis is that it can breed further violence and acts of desperation. ...


It has nothing to do with 'sickness in our society' but with sickness in individuals...."  Reedy was already arguing -- before all the facts could possibly be known -- that Kennedy's shooting was "a formless act committed by a psychopath...."


...[President Lyndon] Johnson's address on the evening of June 5 followed Reedy's prescription for the most part. 


Kennedy was still clinging to life as LBJ intoned, "We pray to God that He will spare Robert Kennedy and will restore him to full health and vigor. 


We pray this for the nation's sake, for the sake of his wife and his children, his father and his mother, and in memory of his brother, our beloved late President....


It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive, to ignore the connection between . . . lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence. 


It would be just as wrong, and just as self-deceptive, to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency.


Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr. Martin Luther King in April of this year."

















{excerpt, The Kennedy Half Century, by Larry J. Sabato.  Bloomsbury, New York-London-New Delhi-Sydney.  2013}


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