Parenting & Family Quote by Bobby Sands

Revenge usually arrives with a body count. Bobby Sands reroutes the word toward something harder to confiscate: a future. Written from the moral furnace of the 1981 hunger strike, the line turns a prison cell into a long-view political weapon. Sands is talking to an audience that might reasonably crave payback in the conventional sense; he offers a substitute that still satisfies the appetite for justice but refuses the state-and-paramilitary script of endless reprisal.

The genius is the pivot from "our" to "children". "Our revenge" sounds like a threat, a promise of returned violence. Then the sentence disarms itself: not bullets, but laughter. It smuggles tenderness into a vocabulary built for retaliation. That tonal swerve is the point. It asserts that the ultimate humiliation of an oppressor is not being overthrown by a mirror-image brutality, but being rendered irrelevant by a generation unafraid.

Subtextually, it also rehabilitates the idea of Irish nationalism as life-affirming rather than death-driven, a crucial move when Sands himself was choosing death as political speech. The line insists his sacrifice is not a romance with martyrdom but a down payment on normalcy: children who can afford to be carefree because the conditions that produced hunger strikes have been dismantled.

There is defiance here, but it’s disciplined. Laughter becomes a metric of liberation: proof that trauma didn’t get the last word, that history’s intended inheritance - fear - was interrupted.