The "mindless menace of violence"

Bill Bumgarner is a retired former health care executive from northwest Iowa who worked
in hospital management for 41 years, mostly in the state of Iowa.

Gun violence made headlines again on September 10.

As I write this, two children lay wounded following a school shooting in Colorado. Political commentator Charlie Kirk is dead, the victim of a single shot from a sniper while holding an event at a university in Utah.

Of course, the political class is offering thoughts and prayers. But there will be no meaningful action. Again. We already know that.

Yet, with every act of gun violence, I think back to a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general, U.S. senator and presidential candidate. He delivered these remarks at the Cleveland City Club, in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 5, 1968, the day following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

To me—nearly 60 years later—Kennedy’s words still resonate and speak directly to the challenges that confront the United States in its unending effort to become “a more perfect union.”

His comments use some gender references of the era, but the message is clear and speaks to everyone. Americans have much work to do to achieve some sense of decency in our daily lives together. Kennedy’s words still address that urgency in ways I could never ably offer to you.

In my mind, it’s his greatest speech

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this 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.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his 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 the people.

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 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 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 lose 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 weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the 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 nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning 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 a 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 now 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 human 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 all. 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 vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and 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 hearts brothers and countrymen once again.


About the Author(s)

Bill Bumgarner

  • These are the stakes

    of the culture war, one side that shares this analysis of the “slow” structural violence that eats away at our body politic like a cancer, and the need for public/common goods, and the other that feeds hateful prejudice, violence, conspiracy-theories, exploitation, and repression.
    With the second coming of the MAGA movement in our governments this violence has been accelerated (even to some degree with DODGE-style AI surveillance automated), including by fascist influencers and their media networks.
    As our good host recently commented about the unfortunate murder of hate-monger Charlie Kirk
    “You can condemn political violence without rewriting history about the victim.
    Charlie Kirk was absolutely not “practicing politics the right way.” He spread conspiracy theories, demonized marginalized groups, and called one of the most qualified Supreme Court nominees a “diversity hire.”

  • I remember hearing Robert Kennedy speak.

    I had and have enormous respect for him. However, I don’t like some of this speech.  Violence is defined in the dictionary as “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”  If all forms of oppression, injustice, wrong-doing, and neglect are called “violence,” the word “violence” loses meaning.  And it’s a very important word. 

  • PrairieFan

    what kinds of structural oppression do you imagine don’t cause “hurt, damage, or kill someone or something” and do you really think that being terrorized by people (who may physically harm you) isn’t to suffer violence? Where do you find all forms of wrong-doing and neglect being listed?
    The part of the talk that isn’t factually true is “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.
    No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders.”
    Political violence has very often been successful and riots and civil disorders have often played key roles in political change….

  • dirkiniowacity

    The dictionary definition of violence, as I pointed out, refers to “physical force.” The speech refers to, among other things that do not involve physical force, “the slow destruction of a child by hunger.” Two very wrong but very different things.

  • so starving children isn't violence?

    wow you could have a career doing PR for Israel.

  • if we are stuck in a world-view

    where slapping someone is violence but dumping carcinogens into rivers ( or say cutting life-sustaining federal programs) isn’t we have conceded our political-economy to MAGA and their oligarch backers.
    That will be a sicker, sadder world of even more mass suffering and death.
    https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/slow-violence-and-the-environmentalism-of-the-poor.pdf

  • dirkiniowacity

    So there is now only one acceptable word for doing wrong to others, and that word is “violence”? The dictionary (and the U.S. legal system) failed to get that memo and so did I. Of course the word “crisis” is now applied to everything from mass starvation to a shortage of Taylor Swift tickets, so I should have seen this coming.

  • I Love These Debates!

    Below is the definition of violence I found on the Webster’s site. While I agree many of us first think about violence as a physical force, it appears it can also include other types of force.

    Robert Kennedy was passionate about poverty and other systemic issues that impacted the poor and others. So it doesn’t surprise me he used the word violence.

    He was quite conservative when he started working in government and while serving as attorney general on some issues.

    His brother’s death changed him. His compassion for the underprivileged soared. On some economic issues you could argue he was almost radical. He was always a tough law and order guy, but he went way left on Vietnam and economic opportunity in his final years.

    1
    a
    : the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy
    b
    : an instance of violent treatment or procedure
    2
    : injury by or as if by distortion, infringement, or profanation : OUTRAGE
    3
    a
    : intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force
    the violence of the storm
    b
    : vehement feeling or expression : FERVOR
    also : an instance of such action or feeling
    c
    : a clashing or jarring quality : DISCORDANCE
    4
    : undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text

  • So be it, and I hereby officially surrender.

    I will now add “violence” to my personal “semantic bleach” list, per the definition of that term below. I try to use alternatives to bleached words when writing.

    “A number of words have become so overused or broadly applied that their original, specific meaning has become diluted or even lost entirely. In linguistics, this process is known as “semantic bleaching”.

  • For anyone who "loves these debates":-)

    It turns out that some linguists are very interested in what has been happening to the word “violence” recently. Here is one example — the abstract of a 2022 paper by Boches and Cooney. Enjoy! After some skimming on the topic, I will avoid using “violence” in future. I didn’t know it had turned into a cultural debate. It turns out I was right about the traditional meaning, but the traditional meaning, per below, seems to be going or gone.

    ***

    What Counts as “Violence?” Semantic Divergence in Cultural Conflicts

    Abstract

    In times of conflict, the meaning of words tends to fluctuate. For example, the word “violence” traditionally refers to physical force against people or property. However, some have expanded the term “violence” to include non-force (e.g., speech). Conversely, others have actively avoided the “violence” label to describe clear instances of force (e.g., property destruction). When the definitions of concepts expand and contract, semantic divergence – the degree of disagreement over the meaning of words – increases. Drawing on the work of Donald Black, we derive a partial explanation for the semantic divergence of “violence” labeling in cultural conflicts. First, at the macro-level, as social intimacy and inequality have declined over the past few hundred years, violence has become increasingly stigmatized, rendering an allegation of “violence” a potentially powerful weapon for deployment against cultural opponents. Second, at the case-level, social distance and partisanship, fostered by the internet, combine to produce social polarization – factions internally close but externally distant – of which a predictable result is the semantic divergence of “violence.”

  • That’s Interesting

    The Bleeding Heartland community is now fully versed in the flexibility and evolution of the word “violence.” Now let’s focus on “peace.” : ) I bet Dirk would agree.

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