Yes, good idea. I was going to suggest something along these lines. Onward.
If you choose to characterize joining the military in war time and being injured and killed as not “sacrificing”, then I guess that’s your right. I already pointed to the extensive involvement of the Kennedy clan in the Special Olympics. By your own definitions they demonstrate “the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim” by volunteering their time and money to charity.
Ignoring all the responses to this thread, the dude has SOME gravitas because he ain’t been shot yet. The rest is because The Press has imagined he’s important because of who his brothers were. Otherwise, he’s just another senator who has managed to stay in office, Capisce?
The Kennedys, or anyone else who is so involve d in a charity is indeed sacrificing their time. Your first sentence dismisses the main point though. Let’s say, Person X has the desire to be a general, so he join is the army. His lifelong dream is to wear the stars on the shoulder. Would you say that this persons time in the military is a sacrifice? How? He is doing precisely what he wants to do with his life. Now let’s say, hypothetically, you agree that since he is spending his time pursuing his goals that he is NOT making a sacrifice in serving. But then, as a captain in a war zone, he gets killed. Again I ask, what was he sacrificing. He was exactly where he wanted to be. It is a terrible loss, no doubt, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to a sacrifice. Compare with Pat Tillman, who left his chosen career and wife and kid to serve his country in war. What Tillman did is unlike what the other person did, wouldn’t you agree? I try to be a little more careful with the word “sacrifice” in this context as I think it needs to be reserved for people who do the type of thing Tillman did. I feel the same way about “hero”, and more strongly, but that’s another discussion entirely.
magellan01, your idea of sacrifice is different from any understanding that I’ve ever heard before. Parents sacrifice their feelings for the good of their children’s development all the time. If they don’t, they will end up with an overly dependent child with no self esteem. Did you think your parents really wanted to give you the keys to the car and send you out alone that first time?*
Rose Kennedy raised really strong-minded sons. Apparently she didn’t try to shield them from much. I wonder what kind of courage and sacrifice it must have taken for her to continue to encourage Teddy to run for President after Joe had been killed in the war, Jack had been assassinated in office, Bobby had been assassinated during the campaign, and Teddy had broken his back in a plane crash. Don’t tell me that she didn’t struggle with that one on a personal level.
She still saw them as her sons not as a political dynasty. On May 29, 1965 Rose Kennedy gave me an inscribed photograph of the President. Under his picture she wrote, “48 years today.” She was still thinking of the child that she bore.
ralph, in answer to your OP, I don’t think that it’s deification with Teddy. People are a little more realistic about him. But unlike his brothers, he had longevity of service and he really did accomplish an enormous amount of good things for the elderly and the economically disadvantaged. He was also very much in support of health care and did something about it. I started making a list of his contributions during his Senate years and just got tired of typing after an hour.
Just think of how long he has served! I was nineteen when he became a Senator. I will be sixty-five in six weeks. He’s very well-liked personally in the Senate. Orin Hatch is one of his best friends.
There was a tendency to put President Kennedy on a pedestal for a long time. I’m sure I still do even though I know now that he had feet of clay. I think Bobby would have made a more interesting President in the long run. He was really changed by things that he saw. I think he felt things on a different level but only toward the end of his life.
Anyway, my point is that for the older generation – at least the ones who are liberal and were adults when the President was assassinated – you are not really going to change their feelings about the Kennedys and you are not going to be able to feel what they feel if you didn’t live through it from the beginning. The Kennedy Presidency and assassination changed us probably as much as WWII changed the generation before us. It was an eye-opener like nothing before it.
Ask most 65 year olds where they were November 22, 1963 and most of them can tell you.
Whether, in retrospect, the Kennedys deserve the attention is almost beside the point.
I think he is being deified because he is the only Kennedy to make it to his age.
Nice. Now I have fuckall chance of getting past St Peter for laughing at that.
I assume you didn’t celebrate Memorial Day?
Those dead soldiers didn’t make any sacrifice, since shooting is something that was done to them, they didn’t voluntarily get shot.
And don’t tell me they volunteered for service to the country that involved a risk of being shot, because that’s exactly what you’ve ruled out in the Kennedys’ cases.
Sailboat
Well. I understand the sentiment you express, but your attempt to take a word you can find in any dictionary and to tell me it doesn’t mean what the dictionary says, but what you say, is more than a little Orwellian.
Yes, parents make sacrifices for their children all the time, to put a good roof over their head, to give them a good education to teach them lessons, etc. But, making the sacrifice entails being the one making the decision. So unless you are talking about a family where the parent decides for the child whether or he or she goes to war, then the parent is not the one making the sacrifice. If this is still not clear, I suggest you check a few dictionaries.
This desire to take words like hero and sacrifice and to expand the definition so wildly that it shower everyone with a little of the admiration associated with the words would be laughable if it were not so effective in stripping the words of their true meanings.
But she did make a decision.
Like any intelligent woman who had already lost two sons to political assassination, I’m reasonably certain that Rose Kennedy was very frightened for her last remaining son when he decided to run for the presidency. She knew that many people would like to see him dead and some of them would like to take credit for his death. (Also, two other children had been killed overseas in the 1940s.)
But rather than giving in to her natural instincts to protect her son, she made the decision to set her feelings aside and to encourage him in his candidacy. If you cannot see her decision to keep her fears to herself as a monumental sacrifice, then you do not understand the emotional side of sacrifice.