As so often happens when consequential people who were not actively malevolent die after a long illness, I've found myself more moved than I expected to be by Senator Kennedy's death.  Long-expected deaths following lengthy illnesses are like that.  Whether the person is a close relative or a famous person, the long illness fools us into believing that we've prepared ourselves for the inevitable and taken advantage of the advance warning to put their life into some kind of context in our minds.  Then, inevitably, we find in the event that all of our preparation and rumination was illusory.   

Thus did I find myself bawling like a baby at my grandmother's funeral several years ago.  She spent years--I started to say "many years," but it only felt that way--dying as successive TIA's and, later, full-blown strokes took her from us, and from herself, a piece at a time.  In the end, she died at a very ripe old age and we were all able to allow ourselves to feel relieved that it was over for her.  And, yes, for my mom who, for another seemingly very long time had been one of those old people caring for old people who have become such a fixture of our broken health care system.  So I thought I was sufficiently resigned and had her life sufficiently philosophically resolved that I would leave her funeral with my composure more or less intact.  And then I saw all of her remaining living friends, little old ladies who were the remnant of her church circle, distant relatives, perhaps a student or two whose life she'd touched during her forty-two years teaching elementary school and the four or five after her retirement when she taught Head Start.  All of them were absolutely shattered, clinging to each other and weeping in a way that was inconsistent with the amount of funereal experience you accumulate by the time you're their age.  

And it suddenly, all at once, it hit me, really hit me for the first time, how many lives she had touched.  I looked beyond the circle of my immediate family and realized for the first time that a pure white light had gone out and that the whole world was a little darker for her loss.   And thus it happened that about half a minute into a well-intentioned, but not very apt eulogy--our denomination believes in itinerancy of clergy and this one had come shortly before she became too sick to go to church--there I was in the front row at her funeral, crying like a child.  Despite all the advance warning, I hadn't really put her life into its true perspective until after she was gone.  I had always intellectually understood how many lives she had touched and it had always warmed my heart and made me proud of her, but I hadn't really grasped the meaning of that until she was gone.  So then I cried.  For them.  For all of those people outside my own family whose lives she had touched and for a world now ever-so-slightly diminished by her loss.  

That was ten years ago and I'm crying now, just writing about it.  

In the next few days, there will be a million eulogies for Ted Kennedy.  Among liberals especially, there will be a million more attempts to distill meaning and lessons for us all from his life and his career.  Inevitably, many of these will be more or less pure projection, attempts by the authors to inflate the importance of their own opinions and beliefs and desires by attaching them to the vastly more consequential figure of Ted Kennedy.  

This may well be one of them.  I don't know.  In the nature of things, it is also inevitable--somehow, I just seem to keep coming back to that  word today-- that those doing the projecting will be incapable of seeing that that's what they're doing.  At least, among those who are sincere rather than cynical and I flatter myself that I am at least sincere.  

To say Ted Kennedy was a larger-than-life figure for those of us who knew him only through the news is obvious.  Even trite.  To be honest, for a very long time, I was mad at him for running against Jimmy Carter in 1980.  No need to rehash why now.  With the self-righteousness of the young, I was, for a long time, also unable to separate his personal failings from his public service, particularly in the years just before Orrin Hatch and some others in the Senate basically did an intervention on him (an event that both evidenced and sealed their friendship).  And then, about twenty years ago, I had a mini-epiphany about Ted: the only proper yardstick by which to measure the life of a politician in a democracy is that of "net public good."  "Has this person, on balance and over the course of his or her career, done more good than harm for the people and, if so, how much?"  That's the test.  Certainly, personal factors are part of the measurement, and there are some personal failings so great that they can tip the "net public good" scale over to the "harm" side.    

It can be a deceptively complex measure.  Think about Lyndon Johnson--so much public good vs. so much harm from that wrong-headed, unnecessary war.  Or John Kennedy--a certain amount of public good in his tragically attenuated life vs. his very, very, very sordid, but, prior to is death, extremely private, personal life.  

But, in Ted's case, by 1990, looking back at all he had done, all he had fought for, all the harm he managed to avert during the Reagan years, it was easy to know where the balance was, Chappaquiddick included and notwithstanding.  And that was as of 1990, two decades before his career ended.   As it happened, that was an epiphany that later stood me in good stead during the Clinton administration.  You should never stop wanting or hoping or expecting for more and better from a politician, but, at the end of the day, or the end of the life, the thing that really matters when you're judging a person is whether he or she has, on balance, done more public good than harm.  

That's a lesson I taught myself because of Ted Kennedy, and it was, I thought, the key to putting his life and career into perspective as I've thought about them during the long melancholy coda of his final illness.  And, inevitably--there's that word again--I was wrong.  

I found out he'd died only this morning, when I awoke at 6:35 to the sound of NPR voices speaking of Ted Kennedy in the past tense.  Over the course of the day, as I read the inevitable (that makes six, I think) classless, hateful comments from the escapees from the freeper asylum, I realized that the real lesson, for me, anyway, of Ted Kennedy's life wasn't about his achievements as a public figure, after all.  Instead, it was about how he conducted himself as a Senator and what it teaches us about what, above all, it should mean to be a liberal.  It's a lesson summed up not by anything Senator Kennedy ever said, but, rather by something Medgar Evers said:  

 "When you hate, the only one that suffers is you, because most of the people you hate don't know it and the rest don't care."

 Therein, I think, lies the real meaning of Ted Kennedy's legacy in the Senate and as a liberal.  He was a ferocious and passionate champion of his causes and the most fearsome rhetorician in the Senate for decades.  He saw more personal tragedy, and had more reason to hate, than any one person should be expected to endure.  For decade after decade, he was, and even today still is, the target of the ugliest, most vicious, most vituperative invective that the angry right has been able to eject.  He was, and even today still is, the focus of all the burning, fear-tinged detestation of the growing millions of people in this country who have wholly given over their lives to the terrible consumptive drug of hatred.  

And despite all of that, through all of that, he never, to my knowledge, hated anyone.   His public anger, though often righteous and always fearsome, was also invariably transient.  In the Senate, he saw past, and through, the most profound and intractable political disagreements and saw personal friends.  Through whatever mental matrix he built out of the towering privilege he was born to and the unrelenting series of tragedies he endured, Ted Kennedy understood, at the elemental level, what Medgar Evers was talking about.  He understood that anger and hate are synonymous with futility and ineptitude in politics and a recipe for nothing but personal misery in life.  He knew, deep down knew, that "liberalism" entailed compassion and understanding for those who hate you as much, or more than for those who love and support you.  

Anger and fear and hatred have never been in short supply in America.  They fueled a century of massacre for the Indians and another century of brutal oppression enforced by murder and terrorism upon minorities following the end of the Civil War.  They are emotions that are the means by which people surrender their reason and their will to the unscrupulous.  Most of the time, in this country at least, those who are afraid and angry and hateful have been the playthings of the right.  The politicians of the left have dabbled in the hate-pen from time to time, but it has usually been the right that has most unapologetically wallowed in the sty.  In this country, at least.  

However, I don't believe there's been a time in this country since the ominous 1850s when one of the two major parties has been so utterly consumed and controlled by angry, fearful hatred.  It has been growing for a long time and I suspect it has still further to go before it burns itself out as it inevitably (seven) must.  Perhaps it is only that the individual haters are more visible now because there are so many fora in which they can express themselves.  Certainly, it is impossible to avoid it if you spend any time on the Internet.  You see it in the sick, feverish hatred that drenches the comments of the websites of every "mainstream" news source.  When morbid curiosity draws you to their own sites like Free Republic or Townhall or even the surreal pink nightmare of right wing vitriol that hillaryis44.org has become, you see it.  It spews into the airwaves 24/7 from mouths alternately gleeful and crazed.  It drips onto the editorial pages of major newspapers, disguised as erudition and "seriousness."  Voices of reason on the right these days are rare, reviled and increasingly cowed and coopted.  

And my greatest concern is that it seems to be spreading to our side.  All the years of abuse and all the injustice re-institutionalized during the Reaganite era left their mark on too many of us and, I fear, too many of us are becoming possessed by an opposite, if not equal, hatred all our own.  I see it not least it in our growing tendency to dehumanize our opponents and reduce them to propagandistic caricatures (granted, they aren't making it any easier for us to resist the temptation).  It's what makes me flinch a little when I see people here who regularly use terms like "Rethug" or "Repug" in their comments--not because I much care for them myself, but because it indicates that something bad is going on in the heart of someone on my side, who I may even, in some hazy, virtual sense, have come to care for.  It disconcerts me because both of those terms, and those like them, are far too reminiscent of the slurs people use to describe the enemy in a war as a means of muting the fact that their enemies are, in fact, fellow human beings. And yes, mea culpa, I use terms that are arguably just as dehumanizing sometimes. 

But, in this case, those enemies we're trying to dehumanize are, in fact, our countrymen.  If we, the liberals, the supposedly compassionate, empathic, humanistic ones, lose sight of that, what hope do we have left as a country?  

I have never been very good at keeping a good personalized hate going over the long haul.  I can keep detestation for specific politicians going indefinitely and that can flare up into momentary hatred from time to time, but I just find continuous seething hatred to be too much work for my fundamentally lazy nature to keep up.  The only exceptions, the only times I've been able to keep a steady, sustained hatred burning over a period of months have been the two or three times in my crazy twenties when it started out as love.  I'm not sure that those count as experiences comparable for whatever is fueling the vile comments and the inexplicably enraged people from the townhalls or the Palin rallies because, in each of my cases it would have--and sometimes did--flip right back into love in a heartbeat, given the proper stimulus. That's one of the reasons I became an instant devotee of "Casablanca" the first time I saw it, back in college.  At twenty, I knew exactly how Rick felt about Ilsa the first time I saw that movie.  What I do know from those experiences, however, is how intoxicating hatred can be.  How exciting and seemingly fulfilling, the same way addictive drugs are seemingly fulfilling, it can be.  

How frightening the thought of letting it go and living without it can be.  

People who are contemplating the thought of kicking a drug addiction feel that same fear.  The analogy of hate to an addictive drug is near perfect not least because it may not even be an analogy from a physiological standpoint.  Hate provides the same initial heady rush that it takes more and more to feel.  And like an addictive drug, there eventually comes a point where there's no amount you can take without killing yourself that will bring back the rush.  All that remains is the destruction of self, whether physical or mental, the self-inflicted suffering that you just can't quite quit.    

Ted Kennedy knew about self-destruction and, perhaps, even addition, but he didn't go there on hate.  Instead, he built long-lasting, deep, sincere friendships with people whose names, frankly, might induce us to spit on the ground.  In his early years, he rejected an overture from Nixon to implement a national health insurance plan because he wanted single payer and nothing else would do.  In later years, as the real alternative--nothing--wrecked greater and greater damage on the people of America, he regretted that, and similar, decisions and became an avid practitioner of incrementalism.  He didn't do it because he was a sell-out or a tool of the big corporations.  He did it because age and experience taught him that the accumulation of incremental change over a period of years can result in huge change over the long haul while absolutism can result in lost opportunities.  And as he pursued those incremental changes, the hearty humanism that allowed him to see friends hidden behind opposing ideologies bore fruit, as time and again it allowed him to pick off a critical vote here and there on particular bills from among the ranks of his usual opponents.  

Senator Kennedy's incrementalism did not always serve him, his party, or his ultimate goals well.  Sometimes, it led to what, in hindsight, were lost opportunities and outright blunders.  But then he could say the same thing about the perfectionism of his younger days.  There's a lesson for us there, too, I think.  

However, I believe the more important lesson is that throughout his career the red-faced anger he could work up on the Senate floor on behalf of those who were getting a raw deal was fierce but always fleeting.  It is those booming laughs and quiet acts of kindness that will echo around the chamber for years to come.  I hope that for us on the left--from the barely left to the center left to the far left--I sincerely hope that we make that his real legacy.  Let us fight fiercely and passionately for that which we believe but let us hold on to our compassion even for those who hate us, however hard they try to make us let it go.    

Rest in peace, Senator Kennedy.  Thank you for your service.