Teddy..You Either Loved Him or Hated Him

It seems that no one was indifferent to him. Some were ambivalent when he took the low road from Chappaquiddick, but he never stopped being a voice for those of us with a leftward bent. Ted Kennedy, then married to Joan, pressed my hand for a brief second at a rally for the ERA, way back when. He was so young and had already lost three older brothers..one to war and two to the bullets of cowards. Like the rest of his remarkable clan, he kept on keeping on.

Whatever your feelings were for Senator Kennedy, you cannot deny that he left his mark. Whatever anyone, including me, might have thought about his personal life, he was steadfast in supporting the efforts that I also supported. Though he didn't know me, I thought of him as an ally. Kennedy was the Senate's dominant liberal and one of its "legendary dealmakers," per MSNBC. He came to be respected on both sides of the aisle.

His own words stand in tribute and encouragement; "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die,"

(1980 Dem Convention Speech)

So long, Camelot.

The Sky Is Falling

This seems to be the newest in a long line of the ultra-conservatives scare-tactic modus operandii. Why anyone would consider Sarah Palin's comments worthy of repeating, I don't have a clue. I won't have to worry about the GOP grooming her for the presidency. She would make a fool out of herself on the first campaign outing. But she joins the "Death Panel" scream team as some kind of party totem. Now, along with the dumbness of the Birthers, we have the inane alarmists of the Death Panel-ers. Ye Gawd, will it never end?

As a senior citizen, myself, I can see several good things for those of us on fixed and lower incomes in the president's ideas. True, it needs a bit of polishing, but that is they way of all things. The far right has not been successful, so far, with its dire warnings of "socialism," so they drag out the old fear tactics. This is how the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated..with specious and inane specters of unisex bathrooms and the death of marriage as an institution and jobs being stolen from the more worthy "menfolk."

If the Chicken Little followers would just sit down, use their brains and read the entire thing, they would find nothing in there about deciding against treating the elderly as a way of saving money. But then, things can be twisted and gnarled by the "proof texters" until they are unrecognizable. This is like the ultra-self-righteous using out-of-context Bible verses to try to prove their points.

That the attacks by the Birthers and the Death Panelers smacks of racist maneuverings goes without saying. It's a lot easier to get the non-thinkers to fall in line if the target of the rumor-mongering is a mixed-race chief executive. As much as I would like to believe Maya Angelou when she said that we had finally "grown up" as a nation, I fear we have a ways to go yet. This is still a horribly, Puritanically rigid and racist nation. I often want to weep for all of us.

And, our bi-partisan system is no longer a balancing one. It has become, and, in fact, has been, for a long time, an adversarial, confusing and vicious one. In every culture where there has been a big gap between the haves and the have-nots, there has been an ultimate revolution. This is what scares the most conservative of the GOP since they and their meal-tickets are the "haves." We have long sacrificed our founding values in the name of capitalism and at the expense of our social conscience. We already have socialism in place with free public education and Social Security. A little bit more socialism might not put money in the fat cats' pockets, but is sure wouldn't hurt our country's image or esteem. Why can't we be the land of opportunity AND compassion?

Ooops, I think I just dislodged a piece of the sky!