My deepest sympathy to Ted Kennedy and family

Like his family, friends and colleagues, I am deeply distressed at the news that Ted Kennedy's seizure has been caused by a malignant brain tumor. I offer prayer that his medical treatment will give him the best chances and that he and his family will find comfort and support throughout.

Being of an age in years where I've grown up with the Kennedy family in politics, I share a long history with Ted Kennedy and remember him well through all the forty plus years of his service. I've admired two things about him. One is his deep and honest commitment to civil rights. Of all his liberal tendencies his finest calling has been in his dedication to civil rights and equality for all. His contribution should never be underestimated.

The second thing that I admire about him is how he has been a rock for his extended family, through both the joyous times and the terrible times. Some years ago I was reminded of his continuing role in this regard when he was strong and eloquent when Jackie Kennedy Onassis died. A father who has had to be an extended father, an uncle to many people, both literally in his family and extended beyond, these are some of his finest traits.

One of my wishes for a very long time has been that with age and a changed view that Ted Kennedy (and others such as John Kerry) would, however, have a personal conversion and change in heart regarding the issues of the family and the culture of death in this country. I am a patient and understanding soul. I know and have often had to explain to people that it takes a long time for some people who are kind and liberal in many areas to understand that abortion and attacks upon the traditional family and against a pro life culture are the cruelest cuts of all. Sometimes it takes many years to understand that, since that is the challenge of morality, the gaining of virtue, and wisdom. For example, civil rights are fine but what does it mean if a people abort away a generation of children who should have been born into equality and freedom? I continue to hope that Ted Kennedy, while he navigates this illness, will contemplate these things and still come to a fuller understanding of God's greater plan. I was not joking when I commented with a humorous twinkle in a Catholic blog that I'd like to be John Kerry's spiritual director (and of course, all these other politicians who have lost their way in the moral compass of being pro life). I hope that Ted Kennedy and others take my good wishes and my hopes for their greater insight sincerely to heart.

Meanwhile, accept my prayers and best wishes.

A Kennedy event

Manic depressive new age obsessives can rejoice because one of their favorite obsessions, the Kennedy family, have had an "event." Senator Edward Kennedy is in the hospital being checked out for the causes of one or more seizures this morning. So people whose lives are so sad and empty unless they are tracking the "karma" of someone else can get all excited and run their astrology charts, spout forth about virtues, read into it analogies with the Catholic Church, maybe check him for a thetan or two while you are at it, and basically continue to get your rocks off at the expense of this family.

I never met "Ted" but I was at a luncheon some years ago with his ex-wife Joan. When she spoke of how much she loved her children and how proud she was of them her face lit up with a glow. I liked her, but she is the walking talking poster child of how alcohol destroys. Not karma. Not reincarnation. Not body thetans. Not "the whore of Babylon." Alcohol, simply alcohol. Humans continue to fall into simple worldly three dimensional pits, such as addiction, and yet make an industry out of thinking they are part of some great divine machinery. They have the Bible (and the Qur'an) but they are just too broken in their basic intellect and humanity to understand that it is what it is. A person becames a raging addict and loses all that is beautiful in life because they became a raging addict. So we can see a woman like Joan struggle with addictions until they took her down as low as she can go without actually having killed her and instead of people committing themselves even more to anti-addictions programs people continue to have magical thinking seeking to read destiny, doom and karma into just another human family.

Folks, people today don't even have written in the history books the many families, pagan, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Indian, whatever, who have had just as dramatic lives as the Kennedys. Wealthy and or important families have come and gone throughout human history; it is the human condition. They have had tragedy that if some paranoid new age depressive actually had any facts about them he or she could "read" into those families too some great mystical karma/destiny message, but they would be wrong, as they have been wrong and deluded in modern times. People have tragedies and greatness in all walks of life and have had so at all times in history. Look at the Chinese earthquake where families have lost their only child in a government that allows only one child. Is that not as tragic as reading about Kennedys, or Borgias, or the stupid rust bucket Titanic? (No offense to actual family member survivors. I'm talking about the shameful exploitation by some and you know who you are.) How would the Kennedy clan losing two to assassination be any more "destiny" and "dramatic" or "karma" than a peasant family who sent their only child to school, only to lose that child to earthquake in a land where only one child is allowed? Can you not see that it is all the same for humans everywhere throughout human history and that it is simply the condition of life and death within human controlled rules and circumstances? Would the Kennedys have died if guns were never invented? History is made by people who have physical bodies who have circumstances happen in physical conditions within time frames within situations that are part of the human condition.

So I wish "Ted" and his family well, and all I do is *sigh* at what I know is the crazed karma club's oogling at another Kennedy event. By the way, one other reminder. When John Jr crashed his plane I was sad and watched the news. Being of the older generation I remember him from his birth. But as everyone of that crazed karma club oggled about that, why do they not equally oogle about the poor people who died in the most recent Niger plane crash, for example? I'm thinking of the plane that crashed in the neighborhood by the airport that killed many residents and in the marketplace on the ground. How is the John Jr event more of a numinous and "significant" "destiny" than anyone of those who died on the ground when a plane smacked down on them? How do you not know that some clan has had many joys and sorrows and lost someone in that crash and if they were famous would they not too seem "larger than life?" Instead they don't even get their names known, since the poor in the "third world" don't seem to "count" in the "destiny depressive derby."