August 26, 2009
The Dream Lives On: An Appreciation for Senator Edward Moore Kennedy
To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart.
- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, variously attributed, either on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or on the assassination of his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
-2 Timothy, 4:7
The dream lives on.
-Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, at the Democratic National Convention, August 25, 2008
America sustained a great loss late last night.
Senator Edward Moore Kennedy slipped away from us at 77, after a life full of years, of honor, of controversy, and of service to an America to which he was always passionately committed.
With Sen. Kennedy’s passing, an era ends. Ted Kennedy was the last of three brothers -the others being President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy- whose service to America shaped this nation in ways that will be felt for generations to come.
We all expected Teddy’s passing, yet his death -a year to the day after his astonishing “The Dream Lives On” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver- is still hard to bear. For the millions of Americans, myself included, who are of Irish ancestry, his going from us reminds us of the poignant words of another Irish-American Senator, Pat Moynihan, who famously opined that “to be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart.”
Right now, many of our American hearts are broken, irrespective of our ancestry.
Because, for all his faults and flaws, and for all his failures and foibles, which were many, Teddy Kennedy nevertheless believed passionately in an America where every person had a place at the table, no matter how we look, live, or love; how we work, worship, or vote, where we live, or where our ancestors came from. His commitment to an America in which everyone was entitled to a place at the table was instrumental in work to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, among others.
Of Edward Moore Kennedy, we may truly speak the words St. Paul the Apostle first penned in his second Epistle to Timothy: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” For in the end, Teddy Kennedy did keep his faith -both a deep and abiding Christian faith as he learned it in his profoundly Irish Catholic family, and also an equally deep and abiding faith in the promise of America.
For Teddy Kennedy, like every Irish-American, understood that America represented a land of opportunity in which every child of oppression and every victim of dispossession could find what Abraham Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” For the Irish, whether the Wild Geese, or the bog Irish, or the Famine Irish who came to these shores fleeing the Potato Famine (as the Kennedys did) America was, and is, a place where great things have always been possible.
In his speech in Denver last August, Teddy Kennedy spoke of being called to a “better country and a newer world.” Irrespective of our party affiliation, we should all fell ourselves called to help build a better country and a newer world. For irrespective of our party affiliation, America is our common heritage, which we are called by the very words of our constitution to make better, to “form a more perfect union.”
For even now, in times of confrontation and controversy, even in times when so may of us mourn the passing of Edward Moore Kennedy, and with him, the passing of Camelot, the dream of an America in which all can pursue happiness, of an America that remains a shining city on a hill, of an America that is still the last best hope of earth, still lives on.
And the dream shall never die.
Requiescat in pace, Edward Moore Kennedy.
Requiem æternam dona eis Domine, Amen.
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he serves on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.
