THIS IS WRITTEN in my hotel room, in New York City, Wednesday, June 5. This morning I was awakened by the telephone. Mr. Stanley Rader, our legal counsel and financial adviser, also in New York, was on the other end.
"Robert Kennedy has been shot," he said. "I just awakened and turned on television in my hotel room, to get the California election returns, and heard this terrible news. I thought you'd want to turn on your TV immediately."
Of course I did.
As I write now, later in the day, it is not known whether Senator Kennedy will live — or what will be his condition, if he does.
At that point I was interrupted, with guests arriving for an appointment, and kept occupied until after midnight. It is now Thursday morning, and I am writing in flight, 37,000 feet in the air, returning to our campus in England for the close of the college year and graduation, at which I am to preside.
This morning I heard the news that Senator Robert Kennedy is dead.
President Johnson has appointed a committee, headed by Dr. Milton Eisenhower, to study the CAUSES of this mounting eruption of violence. Assassinations — riots — angry marches too often exploding into violence and killings — student rebellions — discord the world over — revolutions — anarchy!
Where will it all END?
Does the future provide any hope?
I could tell the President precisely what are the CAUSES of these things. And I can tell you very definitely where it will all END — and whether the future provides any hope, and what hope!
"Is AMERICA REALLY 'SICK'?" Is a common news headline.
"Is America coming to a POLICE STATE?" asked a nationally known television news commentator yesterday, commenting on the second Kennedy assassination. "If it comes to the point where a Dictatorship is the only way to stop this spreading lawlessness and anarchy," he said, "then the people will no longer choose their rulers — but rulers will choose what people may and may not do — and how much freedom we may or may not have."
CBS commentator Eric Sevareid denied that the United States is a sick nation. "It's hard to believe that a NATION can get sick," he said. "Probably the nearest to it was Germany under Hitler."
Germany under Hitler was a tragically misled nation — but it was not a "SICK" nation in the same way that the United States is today — and not only America; most nations the world over are stud They are morally, spiritually, emotionally, mentally SICK — yes, and largely sick physically, too.
Germany under Hitler was a virile, unified nation of order and precision, going with one satanic will in an EVIL direction they had been deceived into believing was right. Why, they reasoned, wasn't it going to be GOOD for other nations to be ruled and domineered by the "Master Race"?
But the SICKNESS of today is a state of breaking up from within — homes and families breaking up; law and order breaking down; education gone decadent; students in revolt; morals in the cesspool; hope for the future abandoned; a too-large slice of the maturing adult generation turned hippie; teenagers in the grip of drugs, alcohol, illicit and promiscuous sex.
That's NOT ONLY in America. It's in Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden. It's around the world! It's a SICK WORLD!
There is a CAUSE for every effect! There are two broad BASIC causes for these basic ills.
The first has provided the soil that has produced the crop.
I could tell President Johnson, and his Committee, what are the causes that have sprouted this harvest of immorality, crime, violence, broken homes, hopelessness, and frustration. But they will neither find the real causes themselves, nor would they recognize them no matter how plainly I state them.
The SOLUTION IS SOON COMING!
But it will not come by presently constituted authorities. The sickness is going to be CURED, not by our human leaders, but in spite of them!
Here, then, is the first broad BASIC cause that has produced the soil from which the diseases have sprouted: DECADENT, error-based, inadequate EDUCATION, and the resultant general condition of society it has spawned.
It has committed the colossal crime of going materialistic, assuming that only the intellect needs developing; and it has filled growing and maturing minds with error, inculcated a false sense of values, encouraged permissiveness, neglected to instill respect for authority, failed to develop a sense of responsibility. It has utterly misunderstood human nature; basing its psychology on the fallacy that human nature is essentially good — when human nature only wants to be regarded as good, while it wants to do wrong. It has neglected totally the development of righteous CHARACTER, the teaching of moral and spiritual values, the recognition and pursuit of the true values instead of the false.
Because mankind has turned from and lost all contact with his Maker, and the instruction book our Maker made accessible, society has lost ITS WAY! I said before, there is a CAUSE for every effect. Society today does not know THE CAUSE that will produce PEACE. It has lost THE WAY that would produce happiness, universal and abundant wellbeing. It is in rebellion against the WAY that would bring it what it really wants — peace, happiness, abundant well-being, security. It strives to GET those results while rebelling against the way to have them!
Having rejected the revelation of its Maker, humanity has lost all knowledge of the true MEANING Of LIFE — of the PURPOSE for our being — of where we are going, and HOW — of man's true potential. And it is breaking up that basic bulwark of any prosperous, happy, peaceful and affluent society — the happy marriage state and the HOME!
This, then, is the RESULT of a decadent, criminally inadequate and destructive system of EDUCATION. It is the soil for the breeding of immorality, dishonesty, crime, instability, rebellion, revolution, irresponsibility, frustration, hopelessness.
And, in America, we have this fertile soil of discontent IN THE VERY MIDST OF AN UNPRECEDENTED STATE OF ECONOMIC AFFLUENCY! That means that juvenile delinquents, the rebellious, the malcontents, the criminally minded, have the economic means at their disposal for their destructive pursuits.
Now the second cause — the SEED that now suddenly sprouts forth in a mass harvest of violence and destruction.
That second and immediate CAUSE is the modern influences — especially on our youth and maturing young men and women of and just beyond college age.
These influences are the WRONG USE of a too-large segment of television time; the motion pictures; the unfit reading matter, starting with comic books for children, pornography, sex-arousing articles, books and magazines; the modern automobile and its abuses, wrong pastimes and customs.
Reported yesterday privately by telephone, to Mr. Rader from a fellow-attorney in Washington, D.C., was a happening of the night before. Three lieutenants of the United States Marines were dining in a Washington restaurant with three girl friends. A group of three or four Negroes walked in, opened fire, killing two Marine officers and wounding the other officer and one of the girls. This crime was hushed up, kept almost off newscasts and out of newspapers, lest the arrest of the Negroes, if reported, be falsely labeled "police brutality" and start a riot!
In another city, a parent-teacher meeting was being held in a schoolhouse. A gang of teenagers broke into the school, and before the eyes of these parents and teachers, proceeded to smash up and wreck the furniture.
In many high schools, even men teachers must walk down corridors two or more together for their own protection — lest they be assaulted and beaten. It is coming to the place where one is not safe walking down a respectable street or entering a respectable restaurant — but may be assaulted, or shot and killed.
While my wife lay in her last illness more than a year ago, whenever I felt the need of going out for a brisk walk, she always asked: "Please don't walk out on the street. Just walk through the campus where there is the protection of our own security patrol." And for her peace of mind, I did.
This state of affairs is escalating with fast-accelerating momentum. It is fast approaching ANARCHY!
An outstanding authority on morality in today's America was asked whether a nation or civilization can survive the kind of situation now developing.
"Not for long," came the answer!
Can Our PLAIN TRUTH readers REALIZE that NEVER, in this present world, has society entered a condition like this? Can we SEE where it is headed? Must we sleep on, stupidly supposing that if we ignore it, or kid ourselves conditions are no worse than ever, that it will somehow just go away?
This accelerating moral cancer eating away at our SICK SOCIETY signals the END OF THIS WORLD!
Our marriage and HOME relationships are breaking up — and when a right and healthy HOME and FAMILY relationship — with Dad at the helm, the children in respectful obedience, all honoring, obeying and worshiping GOD — when this goes, CIVILIZATION GOES! You need to read the new special booklet on WHY Marriage! . . . Soon Obsolete?
But finally, WHERE is it all leading?
It is leading — speedily — to the ONLY HOPE of human SURVIVAL!
And that is the imminent coming of Jesus Christ — this time in the FULL SUPREME POWER and RESPLENDENT GLORY of the Almighty GOD, to take over the governing of EVERY NATION ON EARTH — to set up a divine WORLD GOVERNMENT that will forcibly put down all war, violence, crime and vice!
The only HOPE of humanity from utter destruction, now, is the WORLD GOVERNMENT that will usher in — in the hands of GOD — the happy, peaceful WORLD TOMORROW!
I know that this mounting violence signals something else, too! It is soon going to SILENCE this typewriter now clicking away on this sheet of paper. It is soon going to SILENCE my voice and that of my son Garner Ted — for a while! It is going to END our growing worldwide Work of preparing the way for Christ's coming.
But, also, it heralds the very IMMINENT coming of the Mighty KING of kings, coming to CHANGE this world, and then to SAVE THIS WORLD, at last!
If YOU, a reader of The PLAIN TRUTH, will not WAKE UP to the situation by our peaceful warnings of love, I say to you, on authority of the living Jesus Christ, these mounting eruptions of VIOLENCE are going to soon SHAKE YOU into realization that these events are REAL — it is indeed later than you think! — and you need to be doing something about it — that you may be accounted worthy to ESCAPE all these things now fast crashing down on this world, and to STAND before the Son of GOD when He appears!
Senator Robert Kennedy thought he was in an hour of victory. He had just won the California Democratic Party primary election. He was full of smiles, gay, even though very tired from a hard campaign — never suspecting that the next flash of a second he would be struck down, mortally wounded, to DIE!
You don't know what the next second may bring for you. But I am telling YOU what the next VERY SHORT FEW YEARS are going to bring for you! Don't let God require your blood on your own head!