Do Words Matter?

There is much debate today as to whether the words of political leaders encourage followers to take violent action. There often seems to be a straight line between the two end points but the answer is not convincingly binary.

I am one of those who often look to history to try to answer today's riddles or at least get a perspective of how current events played out in the past.

For this particular question on the power of words, 1968 offers a sort of "alternative universe" when the spoken words of one politician calmed an entire city while others across the nation burned.

On April 4, 1968, at 6PM, Martin Luther King was shot by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. He died an hour later. When the news hit the wires shortly thereafter, dread, anger and rage swept across the country.

At that moment, a plane carrying Sen. Robert F. Kennedy touched down in Indianapolis. The chief of police urged him not to proceed to his planned rally at 17th and Broadway, in the heart of the city's African-American neighborhood. He could not guarantee his safety.

Kennedy ignored the warnings. He climbed the back of a flatbed truck and spoke, not from a prepared script, but from the heart for four minutes and fifty-seven seconds.

His words mattered. Riots erupted in more than one hundred U.S. cities including Chicago, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, killing 35 and injuring more than 2,500. Approximately 70,000 army and National Guard troops were called out to restore order. There were no guards sent to Indianapolis because there were no riots in Indianapolis that night.

In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Sadly, these are not the kind of words we hear today. To hear all 4 minutes and 57 seconds of them, here is the audio version. Ask if words can matter.