The Prizblog

To be honest, I never really understood what all the fuss was about.  I only met Ted Kennedy once, back in 1999.  My impression of the man then was that he looked short, old and tired.  I shook his hand, but he seemed to not really be there, only nominally acknowledging my presence.  I was 23 years old, and while I didn’t take any offense to it, my immediate thought was that it was time to start thinking about who might be our next U.S. Senator.

 I was 23.  More than that, I was that 23 year old guy who just knew everything.  Back then I knew that the Kennedys were Massachusetts royalty, but, I thought, with increasingly little justification.  Kennedy had become something of a lightning rod for neo-conservatives across the nation who vilified his liberalism.  Meanwhile, legions of good, young liberals across Massachusetts were disenchanted as the political ladder became clogged at the top, filled with role-playing Congressmen, and embarrassingly ineffectual liberal state reps and senators.  The state party couldn’t even seem to muster a convincing run to take the governor’s office from a series of incompetent Republican administrations, out of fear if they presented a good enough candidate, that guy might eventually eye Teddy’s seat.  That’s what I’d heard, anyway.

 I last heard Ted Kennedy speak at the Massachusetts Democratic Convention six years later, in 2005.  It was a real low point for the party.  John Kerry had just been defeated by George Bush.  The war in Iraq dragged into its third year, and the President had just promised to use his political capital to privatize social security.  Kennedy tried to rally the visibly depressed and angry crowd by talking about his years of public service, his brothers, their ideals and how those ideals lived on in the Massachusetts Democratic Party he saw seated before him. 

 Again, I wondered if we could please stop living in the past.

 A few months later, I was involved in an automobile accident with a Massachusetts politician who, I believed – and still believe – was intoxicated.  That guy was never charged with any crime despite my best efforts to see that he was.  It was an infuriating and disheartening experience.  And it made me question exactly how much support I could really give a guy like Kennedy. After all, hadn’t he done the same thing and gotten away with it? 

 These years later, I woke up this morning to find that Ted Kennedy had died.

 Let’s just say that since that car accident, since the 2005 convention, and certainly since the time I first met the Senator, I’ve discovered a lot about myself and the world around me.  I came to understand, in a very real and personal sense, the notion of tragedy when my father died of cancer two and a half years ago.  I’ve also come to understand the nature of loss, and its attendant personal demons.  I’ve come to understand that great men are capable of tremendous sin, and terrible men are capable of fulfilling sacred obligations.  I’ve come to understand that human beings are tremendously complicated and that a real tragedy of modern life is that soundbites will never do man justice.

 In short, I think I’ve come to understand Ted Kennedy.

 Having recently come to being able to appreciate Senator Kennedy’s years of service, I now of course feel a sense of regret that I didn’t come to this point sooner.  I think about my own life, my own mistakes, and I wonder how I would be judged if everyone knew everything about me all the time.  And how it would feel if the general public were actively encouraged to pass judgment on me by people who make a living off of that kind of cynicism.

 I think now about what it would be like to devote your entire career – no, your entire life– to helping other people, and to have those efforts dismissed just as quickly as you can say “Mary Jo Kopechne.”   I wonder if, deep down, Kennedy worked as hard as he did to save the lives of people with terminal illnesses like cancer because he thought he had a debt owed to God that could, perhaps, never be repaid.

 I had occasion this morning to be in Salem, Massachusetts, where I was born and spent the first fifteen years of my life.  Whenever I’m there, it’s 1984 again.  Ronald Reagan is our President, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy is our liberal man in DC, fighting the good fight.  My grandparents live down the street.  My father is still alive.

 My thoughts, of course, drifted toward loss.  How old I’m getting, and how very much we’ve all given up, and how much has been taken away.  The radio wondered who would succeed Senator Kennedy.  I wondered who would succeed my father.  I wondered, nearly aloud, whether the world was equal to the task of replacing all that has been taken away in my lifetime.

 But then I thought about Ted Kennedy again.  It’s 1968, and all of his brothers have been killed. The country, and his family, are in turmoil.  And everyone is looking to him to make it right.  It’s not hard to imagine that, at some point, he too must have just felt like he was absolutely not up to this.

 But then… he was. 

 And for that, I thank him.  I thank him for being the very human being that he was, with whatever consequences that come with that.  I think, at the end of all of our lives, we would be lucky to have others say the same about us.