From the New West blog: Senator Ted Kennedy

The Kennedy Who Lives, Stays and Fights

By Jill Kuraitis, 5-21-08

The terrible news of Senator Ted Kennedy’s terminal brain cancer has dropped my spirits down a dark freefall of loss and fierce memories. 

Kennedy tragedies generally don’t sneak up on you.  One just suddenly learns that a war bomb, an assassin’s bullet or a spiraling airplane has taken another one.  But the few hours of warning we had with Ted’s diagnosis – “he’s had a stroke” progressing to “no, he’s had a seizure but he’s fine” progressing to “he’s got a brain tumor” within half a day doesn’t make it easier to hear that a great American, a man whom I revere, will soon be gone.

Today’s melancholy about Ted isn’t yet the grief that is inevitable, but it’s a shock. It never occurred to me that Ted Kennedy was going anywhere, ever. He is the one who lives, stays and works passionately for the principles I hold most dear.

I hope his treatment is comfortable and successful.  I hope he doesn’t suffer.

I wish I could sit beside him, look into his eyes, and tell him how I feel.

My childhood in a small, agricultural California coastal town as the daughter of a proud Army veteran of several wars who was a liberal’s liberal and a League-of-Women-Voters lefty mother who had homeless people over for Christmas dinner sounds like growing up on Mars to most Idahoans.  In a state this red, people forget there have always been millions who believe funding health care for children trumps tax breaks for rich corporations, that government has no business in our bedrooms or wiretapping our phones, and that we should never embrace the barbarism of torture.  But we are here, and our standards and beliefs have a right to respect if not agreement. 

With the exception of some of the Clinton years, the compassionate and collective-support moral standards in which most liberals believe have been slowly eroded by administrations we abhor as much as any red Idahoan abhors Hillary.  We’ve watched veterans treated like throwaway people, gay citizens endure unacceptable discrimination, mental health facilities shrink and close, millions of Americans go without health insurance and even basic health care, constitutional freedoms disappear under the ‘Patriot Act’, the very Supreme Court be corrupted by political influence - and thousands of other things we consider moral outrages- happen before our astonished eyes. 

That’s why we love to remember President Kennedy’s Camelot, when the promise of our principles becoming the standards of a great nation were within our reach.  I was just seven when JFK was murdered, but I am aware of a sense of optimism, joy and contentment about my parents’ conversation that was suddenly gone.  I remember their suspicion of Lyndon Johnson and then their support for Robert Kennedy as part of the family zeitgeist, and then their terrible, overwhelming sorrow when he, too, was lost.  My mother cried inconsolably about RFK , her grief coming from the deepest part of her shattered world view, and she lost her religious faith, which never fully returned.

The depth of feeling my parents had for liberal principles as embodied by the Kennedys defined my life.  As the years have passed, I’ve watched the Kennedy legacy become less mythical and more realistic and learned that holding an entire family in almost perfect regard doesn’t make sense and isn’t fair. But that knowledge changes nothing about my deep admiration for Teddy Kennedy.

Senator Kennedy’s stunning and dedicated career spent fighting for the poor, the less fortunate, children, veterans, the elderly and immigrants stays as meaningful today as the Kennedy way was to my parents.  He is the one who lived, and who stays and fights, year after year, for the ideas I believe should be the basis of our government. The high regard in which he is held by his Senate colleagues, right and left, and his record of getting things done through negotiated bipartisan effort speak to his qualifications as a great figure in American history.

Adlai Stevenson, another great American said, “Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.” And St. Luke who said, “To whom much has been given, much is expected.” That Ted Kennedy can be described by those words of wisdom is a proud legacy, and one to which we should all aspire.

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