Editorial: Trump, Clinton, acrimony and an echo of RFK

As Campaign 2016 winds down, we conclude it in exhaustion from the spirit of acrimony that has spread across our political landscape.

A radio personality talks about "grabbing my musket."

Another maintains our president is possessed by demons.

A presidential candidate vows to imprison his opponent. Police are roundly depicted as villains. The FBI director is called a criminal. Some critics go beyond disagreeing with our presidential endorsement to describe our free speech as "treasonous."

This is America?

Facts seem not to matter any more. Nor respect. Only theory and suspicion and wild allegation.

What has happened to our discourse?

We live in a land of prosperity, freedom and ideals, but our vitriol would have you think we live in totalitarian oppression.

We hearken back today to another troubled time, to April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to the observations Robert F. Kennedy made that day, two months before he too would be cut down by an assassin's bullet.

Kennedy talked that day about the affliction of violence, but his message was as much about loving and respecting those who differ with us and are different from us, about a wistful longing that America becomes the one nation we wish it to be. In this troubled hour, we ask America to pause and reflect on the echoes of his words:

"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.

"Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

"We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others.

"We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

"Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.

"Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

"But we can perhaps remember, even if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek as we do nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

"Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something.

"Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

As we come together this week to exercise our democracy, let us recommit our devotion to our union.