Amanda and I went to dinner the other night at the Olive Garden - afterwards we went back to Justin's to rescue the 2nd kitten, which turned out to be a very beautiful, healthy girl. When we finished cleaning her up and de-fleeing her, we drove into Hollywood to catch a 10:45 showing of 'Bobby' at the Arclight.

The two of us have been looking forward to this film for months - I was excited to see how Emilio Estevez executed this film that he both wrote and directed (and I shouldn't forget to mention that he also acts in the film).



'Bobby' was fantastic - even aside from it's subject it was very, very well written - very thoughtfully directed and it's cast all gave great performances. But it was more than simply an amazing movie - it was an important movie. One that took over seven years of Emilio's life to bring to the screen, a film that blatantly, in each scene, stands as a labor of love and not just a demographically-constructed money-making motion-picture.

I think one of the aspects that moved me the most were RFK's own words from the documentary footage & news reels used in the film - I'm now 25 years old, which is still very young, but 25 years is far too long for a person to live without the kind of political mindset that RFK seemed so committed to. To hear him talk about class-inequality, the effects of violence and war on the soul of a country, to see a politician so proudly run on a platform of peace, and love for one another... is... something I hope that my sister, Mandy, who is 15, will know from first-hand experience by the time she is the age I am now.

The speech from RFK I found most powerful in the film - was the speech he gave on April 5th, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and only two months before he would be shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel after announcing his win of the California primary. This speech was titled 'On the Mindless Menace of Violence' and I can't seem to read it today without becoming extremely emotional.



I'm not sure if what saddens me the most is the thought of RFK shot and scared on the kitchen floor while these words play in my head - or if it's the longing for these words in today's political debate. Longing for a message of hope and strength from our government - I'm so tired and sickened by our current drum-beat of perpetual fear and ignorance.

Here is just a few paragraphs from that speech - I would strongly recommend following this link and reading it in it's entirety. And commit as much as possible to memory.

[...] 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 the 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. [...]