Idealized

While I was writing that last post I listened to the following and I’ll be damned if those Kennedy’s didn’t again stir my patriotism and altruism.

Edward Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Robert Kennedy:

"In behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert Kennedy, I want to express what we feel to those who mourn with us today in this cathedral and around the world.
We loved him as a brother and as a father and as a son. From his parents and from his older brother and sisters, Joe and Kathleen and Jack, he received an inspiration which he passed on to all of us. He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side. Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty or trust or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely. A few years back Robert Kennedy wrote some words about his own father which expresses the way we in his family felt about him.

He said of what his father meant to him and I quote: "What it really all adds up to is love. Not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order and encouragement and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength. And because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it...." Beneath it all he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention, there were people who were poor and needed help, and we have a responsibility to them and this country.

"Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable condition. We therefore have a responsibility to others who are less well off...." A speech he made for the young people of South Africa on their day of affirmation in 1966 sums it up the best.... "The answer is to rely on youth, not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to the obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans; they cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress.... Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.... And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe...."

My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.
As he said many times in many parts of this nation to those he touched and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say, why not."