It’s not what someone does, it’s how they make you feel

During this mysterious human journey, regardless of where ever we think we are heading and where ever we may actually be going, we to a person demonstrate charmingly and also not so, that we can be arguably inconsistent with our own principles.

As so many, I have and continue to watch the Ted Kennedy postmortem proceedings, alternatively laughing and tearing and frowning, listening to personal and political friend and foe alike tell their stories about Teddy.

Teddy made so many feel so good with his humor, his expressions of humanity, his gifted speech. He also made many feel not so good. But today was his funeral.

Forgive any unintentional or inadequate paraphrasing as I continue.

Among his political friends are Mike Barnacle, if you met the man, at the doughnut shop or elsewhere, you would like the man.

Joe Biden said it was never about him (Teddy) it was always about you. This, even after Teddy told Joe at the compound, put that egg down, it’s worth more than your house.

John Kerry remembered that during a campaign event for Kerry in his 2004 run for the presidency, how Teddy in the patented Kennedy concatenation pointedly bellowed, you voted for one of my brothers and you voted for another of my brothers, BUT YOU DID NOT VOTE FOR ME! But I will forgive you if you vote for John Kerry!

The oft repeated story of how his mother trained him and others that the more is given to someone, the more is expected, was sometimes accompanied by one of his achievements, but other times left with silence, for the listener to fill in the blanks with their favorite memories.

Only after his last brother died some 40 years ago, did Teddy become the Icon of the Liberal left according to Pat Buchanan who also mentioned Teddy once made a seemingly unnecessary human outreach to him. Buchanan self described himself as being at the time, only an ex Nixon aide.

Orrin Hatch speaking at the JFK Center said he rarely agreed with Teddy Kennedy who he sat side by side with on a committee for 38 years, recalled the days when the Senate still allowed smoking. He offered that anyone (anywhere) in the room could tell when he and Teddy  were in especially heated arguments. That was when Teddy blew extra cigar smoke into the face of the non smoking Mormon. He says he loved Ted Kennedy.

Chris Dodd said it is a testament to John McCain and Orrin Hatch that they are here (at the memorial service) both to laud Kennedy and also that they reached across the aisle to support some of Kennedy’s initiatives. With a grin, he said it was also a testament to Kennedy, that he never supported theirs.

Jon Meacham recalled a Shakespearean line that he felt Kennedy lived; redeem your own hour on the stage. Jon seemed to agree with the narrative that Kennedy just soldiered on, continuing to reach out to those who love and agreed with him and those who only loved him, and ignoring all others.

Joe of Morning Joe on MSNBC said that when he left the city he hated but a job he loved to return to Pensacola due to family health matters, Kennedy was one of the few who reached out to him personally, along with only a few of his many political comrades he stood side by side with in the legislature; that Kennedy never gave into bitterness, nor become cynical, accepting that this is a tough world where wars, famines and earthquakes kill people, as do assassins, and doing what he could that he felt was best for the most.

Peggy Noonan told the story about how Kennedy personally approached Ronald Reagan for help with the Kennedy Center (possibly another Kennedy related building) and Ronald Reagan pitched in energetically and successfully to help raise money. For a Kennedy? Think I heard that right; the two who could not be more different in their honestly held, diametrically opposed ideologies. Neither wrong, just humanly imperfect  and semantically challenged, just less than me.

A common theme about Kennedy is that he knew how to bring coalitions together, often in the background, quietly or loudly with the force of his personality, the most personal of his “to much is given” attributes.

Considering the caricatured and maligned practice of politicians making deals in smoke filled, liquor juiced back rooms, part of me hopes that begins to happen again between those of opposite parties. Do I mean to imply to hell with the fourth estate and our “right” to know everything? Perhaps I do. Will they cover each others back? Regrettably yes, and maybe despite that, we will as a country still be better off. I can’t be sure of course, but I do want a change.

Ted Kennedy was the last son of the Joe Kennedy Dynasty; he was a full 15 years younger than President Kennedy, the conservative Democrat most living Americans may remember first, but really know so little about. JFk was picked by orignal Joe to carriy on after Joe’s designated place holder of the Patriarch’s flame of ambition, his oldest son Joe Jr died in the war. He also had to be the one to carry on after Joe’s own performance during the war denied him the presidency. Joe’s larger than life personality and ruthless ambition set in motion the dynasty that has likely ended. But who knows what personality may emerge.

Those to whom he spoke so deeply, accept his “flawed” personal actions up to his escaping the potential multiple years to life long imprisonment  that so many other action flawed Americans have been given. Those sentences are seen for whites, blacks, yellows, browns and for any of the mixed rainbow colors of the homo sapien, and also regardless of other physical differences we observe today after a long time and in once more remove geographical areas. We, more and more, come closer and closer in physical proximity.

Others feel that escape was a terrible public political crime.

Like noses, hearts and other parts, most of us have some strongly held ideological influenced and personally felt opinions that most contrary arguments, however eloquent, mostly fail to pierce.

While feeling some of them deeply myself at times, I always quietly mourn the losses we all suffer at the feet of these relentless and soul sucking confrontations of beliefs and opinions and feelings that divide us so much, that usually turns personal, nasty and all of which mostly serves to thicken our divide.

But then I reach for Teddy’s pragmatism and do my best to soldier on.