Although you are not my Senator, you were my presidential candidate. You have had my respect and support throughout. But when you wept a bit while announcing that you would not again seek the office of president, you had my heart in the palm of your hand.
I wish I could adequately explain here why some people are ahead of their time, or why some seem destined to play a sacrificial role in scenes where their own ambitions must be surrendered for the good of the whole. But alas, I cannot. I can only empathize and sympathize and relate to the questions that must be turning over in your mind about your life's work and your personal goals for a life well-lived, a life of ultimate service.
Rest assured, Senator, yours is a life well-lived and your service the ultimate. You played an integral part in stopping America's involvement in Vietnam. For that I am grateful.
In your current service to public office, you give your best effort to start dialogues and create debates about our role in the Middle East and the world and about government's responsibility to its citizens at home. That too many Americans prefer swaggering, pointy-toed, wide-brimmed glad-handing to an honest and intellectual exchange about solutions to the communal problems of the age says far more negative things about them than it does about you, sir.
Yesterday, Tucker Carlson called you an intellectual, a bore, because you concluded your announcement by talking about issues. Like children being made to eat their peas, we need to be made to listen to the issues. Thank you. Perhaps that is your destiny, sir. To make us eat our peas.
As for Tucker, he seems a decent enough fellow, but he has shown he cannot dance; therefore, you cannot allow him to hurt your public feelings for a man who cannot dance lacks poetry in his soul.
You, Senator, have poetry in your soul. It's clear you hold deeply in you a spirit of truth and justice as the American way, a way which used to rule over the highest laws of our land before slander, libel, power, and divisive partisanship hijacked it from the frontal lobe of American consciousness.
Mr. Kerry, you may not be my Ohio Senator, but you are America's Senator. May you have a long, long continued career making us look at the issues and offering us solutions for them. Keep being an intellectual and boring Tucker Carlson to death. Keep making us eat our peas. Eventually some wisdom may seep into the mainstream and one day flood the land with thought.
Thank you, Senator, for your sacrificing what you wished to become in order to help steer America forward toward the greatness she could again become.
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Posted by K Lee to The Median Strip at 1/25/2007 05:44:00 AM
Cross-posted with permission to DailyKos.