frank theriault wrote:
On 1/16/06, Tom C <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Not taking anything away from what you said Frank. But I wonder... if they
hadn't been assasinated, would they be viewed as such stellar figures? We
shall never know as their works ended abrubtly.
You're right. Here's my thoughts (not that you asked...):
I think that RFK would have won the Democratic ticket in '68.
He probably had a good chance.
Had he
done so, I think he'd have beaten Nixon.
I'm not so sure about that one. Nixon's message was getting out of
vietnam. Since the democrats were in power, and they were mostly
responsible for the bulk of the war effort at that time, they were not
running on a similar message, and thus Nixon was more popular due to the
war's unpopularity.
He'd have gotten the US out
of Vietnam much faster than Nixon was able to.
This is clearly not the case, IMO. JFK & RFK together had committed US
involvement to "saving" south vietnam from the communist north. There
was no way RFK was going to backpeddle on that. He probably would have
committed more troops in an effort to win quickly. But my suspicion is
that it would have backfired and we would have lost more troops and
stayed longer.
He'd have also brought
in comprehensive social programmes.
This is probably correct.
He'd have increased US support
for Israel. How all of those things would have played out is hard to
say. I think the US (for better or worse?) would have been a far
different place than it is today.
As for MLK Jr., that's harder to say. By the time of his
assassination, he was increasingly being seen as "old guard" in the
Civil Rights Movement. More radical groups and individuals were
pushing him out of the spotlight somewhat. The inner cities of the US
were burning, and he and his fellow-advocates of non-violence didn't
seem to have any answers to that.
MLK's future is much more murky than RFK. Its hard to say what he could
have accomplished. But clearly, his assissination galvanized the nation
and turned him into a martyr for the cause of equality and tolerance.
In any event, all I was thinking (even if I didn't quite say it <g>)
is that the assassination of those two figures changed America in a
way that we will never fully comprehend: for better or worse, who
knows?
Yup, hard to tell.
What I do know is that Martin Luther King accomplished more in his 39
years than most of us could accomplish in 10 lifetimes. No matter how
his legacy might have changed were he not assassinated, his life
speaks for itself; in my eyes he was one of the towering figures in
the 20th Century (or any other century, for that matter).
Absolutely. Without him or Rosa Parks, who knows how long the US would
have continued tolerating these laws and practices of inequality. We
still have some today, but nowhere near as bad as those days.
cheers,
frank
--
"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
--
Someone handed me a picture and said, "This is a picture of me when I
was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger. "...Here's
a picture of me when I'm older." Where'd you get that camera man?
- Mitch Hedberg
