As I listened to Ted Kennedy's sons and President Obama eulogize Edward Kennedy, I found myself crying for a man whose hand I never shook and whose voice I never heard except through the television speakers. I realized that I was not crying just for the loss of this great man but because his death is one more leaf that has fallen from our shared Tree of Liberty, and the naked branches beneath are being increasingly revealed as twisted and gnarled.
What impresses me the most is how often those closest to Ted Kennedy have emphasized his desire to separate personal feelings from political battles and how he treated everyone as equals.
President Obama relayed how Ted Kennedy contacted all the spouses of those who lost someone in the World Trade Center, not just the democrats. His son Ted Jr. said his father viewed his republican colleagues as patriots who loved their country with fervor equal to his own.
As I watched President Obama deliver speak on Ted Kennedy's life, I wished the republicans in Congress and the conservatives on television would heed the lessons of Kennedy's life and cease their ugly personal attacks on our president that I believe imperil his life. I also thought about the man speaking, the man behind the title President. It must be painful to hear people equate you with one of the most evil men in the world's history.
Why must conservatives' dislike for President Obama's policies morph into calling him Hitler or Nazi or invoking questions on his American citizenship? Why must it devolve into denigrating his mother and his children and even praying for his death?
These are ugly and undeserved words being used against him by Congressional officials, by conservative media personalities, and by ignorant people. Some know what they say is false, yet they say it anyway; what ugliness drives them? Others are too simple to recognize how they are being manipulated for political gain.
Could anyone watching President Obama deliver this euology today truly see Hitler in his eyes? Did they hear in his voice someone who wants to kill them? So many Americans should be ashamed right now of what they are doing to a fellow human who has never harmed anyone.
We would all do well to learn from Edward Kennedy's life and behave, as he did, like a true patriot, recognizing that we are all Americans. We should be working together, as he did, for the betterment of our country and to preserve its strength rather than pit ourselves against one another in a political civil war.
Yet I know that even as Ted Kennedy is being taken to his final resting place beside his two brothers who died in service to their country, even as people from both parties have come together under one steeple with a shared seense of sorrow for his passing, there are those out there scrutinizing every moment of this service for more ammunition they can use to divide us. We will see them on Fox "News," hear their words on the radio, and read them in print. Others will work hard to tarnish Ted Kennedy's legacy, as they did while he lived.
When peole say Ted Kennedy represents the end of an era in American politics, I think this is what they mean: Congress now has one less voice reminding our legislators that they all work for one purpose: to serve the people.
If anything were to come from Ted Kennedy's death, I wish it would be a reawakening to the notion that it is possible to come together to find solutions and afterwards have dinner together. I am sure, however, that tomorrow's talk shows will remind me of the naivete of this wish.