January 21, 2010 | Comments
The results of Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts have left me thinking about a conversation I overheard this last Christmas.
Our family was flying west to California for the holidays as we do every year, this time with stopovers in both Las Vegas and Reno. On the flight between those two cities, I was seated in front of an older woman and a young female college student. As we took off over the glittering lights of the Las Vegas strip, the older woman introduced herself to her younger seatmate (and, by extension, to me) as a medical-school professor, a recent transplant to Nevada from the East Coast.
Sounding almost like a young schoolgirl herself, this mature professional woman chirped with abandon about her love for her new state. Compared to her life spent entirely in the east, Nevada was in every way living up to its reputation as “the wild west,” she said, a genuine “frontier.” Her enthusiasm for her new home was so infectious, I wanted to jump off the plane and enroll in her medical school.
Anyway, the young woman next to her, a native of Reno, she said, was in her first year at a small Massachusetts college – an International Relations major (whatever that is). The physician spoke to her about her own years training, practicing and teaching in Boston, and they chatted a bit about living in the Bay State. Then the doctor popped the big question: “So how does it feel moving from a state that has no income tax [Nevada], to a state that has one of the highest tax rates in the country [Massachusetts]?”
“Well,” said the girl, “I’m in college, so it doesn’t really affect me.”
I grinned, imagining the wise smirk the International-Relations major’s comment must have inspired on the face of her seatmate. “Oh, it will affect you,” said the doctor. “And I’m sure it’s affecting your parents, and the new federal taxes coming are going to affect them, too.” (As a parent myself, I would not be very happy to think my daughter considered punishing tax burdens as something that “doesn’t really affect me.”)
The girl’s ensuing silence indicated that she didn’t want to talk about this anymore (not a good sign for someone who wants to relate internationally). I’d like to think that once she got home, she made a similar comment to her parents, who in turn decided to look in to the education they were financing for their beloved daughter. If nothing else, I hope the physician’s statement at least gave the girl some food for thought.
It certainly gave me food for thought, as I now think back and wonder if Tuesday’s election in this young student’s adopted state has in any way “affected” her. How has it been presented and discussed, I wonder, in her probably elitist, liberal, kumbaya International Relations classes? I have my assumptions, of course, but do she and so many others like her now realize the gravity of what is at stake for her and for all of us in this country? Do they realize that this election “affected” the state in which this girl now resides, but also in her home state? And my home state. And yours. And every other state in the union.
Perhaps before this girl embarks on her career in International Relations (whatever that is), she should learn about the dangers her own country is facing at the moment – including the tax burden that will await her once she graduates and embarks on that career. I’ll wager she is learning nothing like that in those International Relations classes of hers. We can guess what she is probably learning: the Blame-America curriculum embraced by the President and his advisers and colleagues during their formative years.
As someone more in line with the American-Exceptionalism curriculum, I ask you college students out there to start thinking beyond the walls of those classes. Before you agree to packing your university auditoriums to cheer on the President and provide him with a backdrop for his latest photo-op, as happened last Sunday in Boston (and will surely happen when he campaigns for Harry Reid next month in Nevada), think about the effect this man, this Congress and their agenda could have on your long-term goals, your long-term hopes and dreams. Battles are being waged right now in all of our own backyards that you think “affect” only your parents at the moment, but if this President gets his way, the outcomes of these skirmishes will profoundly affect your future – and not in a positive manner.
So look to Massachusetts and be grateful for what happened there on Tuesday, despite what your professors may be telling you in class. Time to see the big picture and your place in it. Time to think about long-term consequences and, to paraphrase JFK, what you can do, not for this President and his colleagues, but for your country, your family and your future.
In short, wake up. It does affect you.
Betsy Siino | Comments
End of an Arthurian Era
February 12, 2010 | Comments (1)February 12, 2010 | Comments
I was in the middle of writing a piece on Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) last night, when the news broke that he would not be seeking reelection to the House of Representatives in 2010. Perfect timing.
Kennedy’s poll numbers have apparently been slipping – no surprise, given the tsunami threatening to hit the democratic Congress come November. On a more personal level, last month he watched the sacred Massachusetts Senate seat long-held by Ted Kennedy, his late father, go to Scott Brown – a man Patrick Kennedy describes as “a joke.” This upset threw a road block in the passage of his father’s pet project: nationalized, socialized, rationed health care, a mandated plan that would be the exempted Kennedys’ legacy to we the little people.
When Patrick steps down, Congress will be Kennedy-less for the first time since 1962. I frankly don’t consider this much of a loss. If indeed first impressions offer our most illuminating insight into the people we encounter, my first impression of this guy was right on target.
I first noticed Patrick Kennedy pre-Congress, when his cousin William Kennedy Smith was standing trial on rape charges in Florida in 1991. Because Patrick was out partying with his cousin and dad Teddy on that fateful night (Good Friday, by the way), he was called to testify. Jittery and sweating, TV cameras rolling, he stuttered his answers, his eyes darting, voice cracking, desperately seeking, it seemed, that “special treatment” to which his family is so accustomed. Dangling out there alone, I thought he would burst into tears at any moment.
Three years later, at age 26, Patrick was elected to Congress. His legislative career since has been anything but extraordinary, his name making headlines primarily in connection with mind-altering substances: repeated stints in drug rehab, come to mind, as well as his collision with a security barrier in the wee hours one morning in DC (at least he was driving alone). His failed attempts to convince authorities that he was on official business ultimately morphed into a more truthful tale, in which prescription drugs and impaired sensibilities played the starring roles.
In recent months, Patrick Kennedy has made valiant attempts to reach out and grasp daddy’s baton to claim the title of heir apparent. First, he scolded the Catholic Church for refusing to support the democrats’ socialized health-care bill — and, by extension, abortion and rationed care for the elderly, the imperfect and the critically ill. (It would seem a return to chatecism for a refresher course might be in order).
But when, during a post-Massachusetts-special-election hissy fit, Patrick referred to now-Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) as “a joke,” he let slip his spoiled-brat gene – conduct unbecoming, I’d say, of a 42-year-old Congressman. Come to think of it, though, like so many in the political spotlight these days, little in Patrick Kennedy’s life experience has offered him the challenges and obstacles necessary for the transformation from child to adult.
I’ll never forget seeing that “child” in a photo taken at one of his early campaign events in 1994. Shaking the hand of an older woman who could have been his grandmother, he seemed as gawky and uncomfortable in his own skin as he had in that Florida courtroom three years prior. But the woman whose hand he touched…she was in tears, sobbing, it seemed, as though she were touching the hand of a god. It sent a chill up my spine. Given her age, though, and thus her many years exposed to the Arthurian mythology of the Kennedy dynasty, in her mind, perhaps she was touching a god, willingly ignoring the warts and the scandals and the arrogance that have followed that god’s family through history and damaged so many of its young.
Almost 20 years later, it seems that wisdom and clarity are finally beginning to trump the blind infatuation that has protected a name many have considered royal for decades. We saw this in the election of Massachusetts republican Scott Brown. We saw it when Caroline was denied New York’s vacant U.S. Senate seat and an ambassadorship to the Vatican last year. And we see it in the eyes of Patrick Kennedy, who rode into Washington on Kennedy coattails that have now been whipped out from under him. We the people will be better off for the shake-up. Perhaps the esteemed Congressman Kennedy will be better off, too.
Betsy Siino | Comments