As a 6-year-old, I had a less than perfect grasp of the machinery of our democracy... 'Will they shoot Daddy when he is president?'
Five years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, my teachers were still crying...my parents crying when Robert Kennedy was shot.
The phrase that came irresistibly to mind... was Malcolm X's comment that JFK's assassination represented 'the chickens coming home to roost.'
Mao's adage that 'political power grows out of the barrel of a gun' is of little use in democratic politics...what grows out of the barrel of a gun is chaos, and fear, and desperation.
#historical-reflections #impact-of-assassinations #political-power #danger-of-violence #democratic-politics
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