I was named for Teddy Kennedy and so this man has been in my awareness since I was very young. My legal name is Edward Talcott, nicknamed Teddy when I was growing up, (though I go by Theo today). I've spent a lifetime in quiet respect for this guy, and today I feel like offering up some thanksgiving for this good guy from this good family.
When one watches politics habitually, one needs loadstars or points of reference. Teddy Kennedy was like that, a dependable "long-distance runner for justice' as Cornell West would say, someone you could count on to be aligned to the Good.
I appreciated Teddy as somebody willing to slog along for Team Good, one of us in there during the long, ugly trench warfare of American Politics, a liberal icon throughout the Ice Age of Reagan and the Dark Ages of Bush.
Teddy Kennedy fought for health care and for the poor, even when he and his family had their own. He was not a member of the cold-hearted, classist, sociopathic, privileged elite. Instead, he engaged in a life-long struggle on behalf of a vision of America where everybody deserves a piece of the action and equal rights and access to the good life.
I heard that at one time in Washington, there was a conference about his brother Bobby, entitled "Politics: A Profession Not Without Honor", to help political people remember that high-minded values are accessible in the political sphere, and that politicians don't have to be scoundrels. True, the profession does encourage people who can lie. And this makes the people who can bear the ugliness and yet keep pointed towards the Good all the more essential. Because politics is important as a way to have very serious arguments about life and death issues like who will get health care and who will go bankrupt and have their lives ruined.
There are many kinds of lives that a young person could aspire to in this world. Teddy is a good role model of a life well spent, somebody who lived to be an old man, working for good causes for decades and decades, siding with the Good and relentlessly wading into the struggles of our times.
The harps and Angels are certainly welcoming in this ally of the Good even now, this hard-working warrior of the public sphere, who spent so much of his life advocating 'for the least of these' among us. Onward and upward, brother...
