Ted Kennedy – Family, Life, and Lessons – Part 1

I’d like to share a few heart-warming, inspirational, historical, poignant, and just funny articles on Ted Kennedy.  Here is the first.

The Liberal Lion, Neal Gabler, Newsweek, August 27, 2009
http://www.newsweek.com/id/213869/output/print

• On JFK’s death on Bobby Kennedy: “…his brother’s death had such a profound effect on him that it seemed to radicalize his politics.  It was if he had suffered some deep, irreparable wound that suddenly connected him to everyone else who was also suffering.  His liberalism was a function of that empathy – of his own tortured soul and the feeling that it was his job to represent the afflicted and powerless.
• In effect, the Kennedy family was a small welfare state, supported by the father’s tremendous wealth but bound by a powerful sense of community in which each member was responsible for every other member.
• But the Republicans found success by flogging their own version of America, one that saw the country not as a community but as a collection of self-interested individualists.

I can relate to each of these statements, which is (duh!) the reason that I have quoted them specifically.  One point to clarify: I don’t have the riches of my parents.  The rest is accurate. 

While I believe each individual must pull their own weight – learn, put forth effort, sacrifice, contribute, and achieve – my values agree with those of the Kennedy family and I deny the notion of self-interested individualists in a country (or a family).  Unfortunately, as I learned by interacting with each member one at a time, my family seems to be people who are by all intents and purposes individualists.  This seems to come as innately to them as the opposite comes to me.  This disagreement on the definition of a family’s core identity has also contributed to some of the problems we’ve had.  At various times in our lives, that’s an understatement.

The reason for this, I believe, has to do with the migration of our family from India to the United States.  Our age and state of maturity when we moved and our openness to the new life led to us picking up different parts of American culture.  This does not mean we were not all open, we probably were, but because of multiple reasons we were open to different kinds of things.  Each person’s personality undoubtedly played a part in it as well.