Hemingway’s Cut
The Man Steps Into the Arena
The air was heavy with duty. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before them, the weight of his name and the weight of his task pressing down on his shoulders. He had been sworn in, the words settled into his bones like the steady grip of a man accustomed to carrying burdens. The country was not well. He had seen it. He had felt it. Not just in the hospitals, not just in the numbers and the charts stacked high on bureaucratic desks, but in the eyes of the people.
He spoke plainly. There was sickness in the body, yes, but worse than that, there was sickness in the soul. Men walked the streets hollowed out, their backs bent under weights unseen. There was no fire in their eyes, no hunger in their bellies. A man could endure a fever, could endure pain, but to be stripped of purpose—that was the cruelest cut.
So he made a promise. He would fight. He would fight for their health, for their strength, and for something deeper that men had forgotten how to name.
The War at Home
A man must know his enemy. Disease, yes, but also despair. The country had been broken by sickness, by fear, by division. Men did not trust their leaders. They did not trust each other. They drowned themselves in distractions, numbing the ache in their chests with whatever was at hand. Kennedy had seen it before, in history, in his own family. A man without a cause is a man already lost.
He did not offer easy answers. There were none. But he would fight, just as his father had fought, just as his uncle had fought. He would take the blows and keep moving forward. He would not flinch. A man does not flinch when the storm comes. He squares his shoulders, he plants his feet, and he faces it head-on.
A Hard Road Ahead
Kennedy knew the road would not be easy. There would be men in suits, men with soft hands and sharp smiles, who would try to stop him. They would say he was wrong, that the numbers told a different story, that the sickness was only in the body and not in the heart. But he had seen too much to believe them.
The country was tired. Tired of promises that meant nothing, of leaders who spoke in circles while the people suffered. He would not be one of them. He could not be. The blood in his veins would not allow it.
