Bobby Kennedy

He was assassinated forty years ago today.

I was two when he was killed. Oddly, my most vivid memory of his death is actually associated with its 20th anniversary.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a lengthy story to commemorate it. One section included people's personal memories of what they'd done two decades before when they found out that he'd been shot in Southern California.

One woman wrote that she went into her young son's room, removed all of the play guns from his toy chest, and tried as best she could to explain to him why she was doing so. Her simple act brought me to tears.

I looked for one of Bobby's quotes to share, and this was the second one I found. It seems to fit our era as much as it fit his. Our tendency to think in terms of "us" and "them" is too often still repeated:

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?