Saturday I sadly watched the funeral of Senator Teddy Kennedy. So much of this Irish girl’s political heart is wrapped up in the Kennedy legacy. A part of me is afraid that the political landscape will never be the same after Teddy. I think that Joe Kennedy who has worked for years for the environment would be my choice. Regardless of who replaces him in Mass. he will be missed on both sides of the aisle; as a lion and as a formidable adversary. Yes, I know that Edward Kennedy was not perfect. None of us are.
You see, I would not be me if it wasn’t for the Kennedys. At 10, I got into my first political scuffle over JFK with Carol Hibspman. There was a "Vote for JFK" pin on the ground and I grabbed it. When I pinned it on my blouse, my best friend grabbed it and stomped it into the ground. We had our first fight over the man she called a "Godless Catholic." It seems that I have been at odds with conservatives ever since.
Even though my mother was a Republican precinct captain, I had obviously inherited some of my father’s socialism leanings. My mother and father probably cancelled each others votes out that election year, but we all mourned the day JFK was shot. I cried for the only President I had ever seen in person and in color (remember TV was black and white then). I had gotten heat stoke waiting for the motorcade. He came to town for the Frying Pan Arkansas project. This smiling, red-haired President even motioned his driver to slow the limo so Mr. Murtaugh could take movies with his new camera.
I was too young to vote in grade school, but I had started clipping out pictures from Life and the Pueblo Star Journal of this handsome politician and his family. Unfortunately the bulk of them became about his assassination. Grainy shots of Oswald, John John’s salute, and the dreadful blood stains on Jackie’s pink suit. The story was that she wanted the world to see what they had done.
In high school I stayed up late glued to the California primary. I went to bed secure in the knowledge that Bobby Kennedy would be the nominee, but woke thinking I had had an awful dream. My alarm was a clock radio and my mother sadly confirmed that "it wasn’t a dream. Bobby was dead." The country was literally going up in flames then; Martin Luther King Junior assassination two months before, Kent State , the riots in Watts , and the infamous Chicago Convention.
After college I got caught up in my life and didn’t get involved in politics until now. I have never forgotten the Kennedys, especially Bobby. I lost my hope after that June day really until Barack Obama came on the scene. Bobby proposed "policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world," before he was taken from us. So here we are again working to provide health care for all and trying to still close those gaps.
This weekend a somber President Obama eulogized younger brother Teddy. These are a few of the words that stood out to met:
We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature, in support of health care or workers’ rights or civil rights. And yet, while his causes became deeply personal, his disagreements never did. While he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod, that is not the prism through which Ted Kennedy saw the world, nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw him. He was a product of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect – a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots.
And to keep our sense of humor, I must add. Vice President Biden talked about the wonderful wake they had for Teddy. I think that it is the Irish humor that comes through is what I like the best. Here is a part of a famous Irish saying many of you will recognize:
May those who love us, love us.
And those who don’t love us,
may God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts,
may He turn their ankles
so we’ll know them by their limping.
As the arguments over health care rage on, guess what I will be on the look out for?
Erin go Baugh, Senator Kennedy
"You will Know them by their Limping"