...From the dark end of the street
To the bright side of the road
Into this life we're born
Baby sometimes, sometimes we don't know why
And time seems to go by so fast
In the twinkling of an eye
Let's enjoy it while we can...
_________________________________
One of the points discussed here yesterday is well illustrated in the following article:
{Courier Journal
Part of the USA Today Network]
JFK and Jackie were 'pals' with Kentucky senator and his wife
written by James R. Carroll and Joseph Gerth
Nov. 21, 2013
WASHINGTON -- They were seatmates in the Senate....
And until he moved into the White House in 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Democrat from Massachusetts, lived just five blocks from John Sherman Cooper, the Republican from Kentucky.
They and their wives, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lorraine Cooper, were "pals," as Jackie called them.
...The close relationship between the urbane New Englander and the courtly Kentuckian is one of the lesser-known stories of the 1950s and 1960s....
..."We liked each other," Cooper said in a 1980 interview housed at the University of Kentucky's Louie B. Nunn Oral History Center. "I think because of the difference in our ages and the fact that I was a Republican, that he felt he could talk to me about different issues."
..."John Kennedy was not partisan in friendship," Lorraine Cooper would write in her newsletter to Kentucky three days after the assassination on Nov. 23, 1963. "I wish all of you had known him."
Lorraine Cooper was prominent in a small group of Georgetown women who hosted the inner circles of power in Washington, and Jacqueline Kennedy appreciated the kind of grace and stimulating conversation that was a hallmark of the Cooper home.
"It was fun to go to the Coopers," she told an interviewer for the University of Kentucky Libraries' John Sherman Cooper Oral History project in 1981. "It was joyful, but it was never frivolous."
...Jackie said she was either still in college at George Washington University
or working for the Washington Times-Herald when she came to know Lorraine. Jackie then met Cooper in 1952, when she dated John Kennedy.
"My first impression of Senator Cooper is the same as my present impression -- his wisdom, his humor, such a fine, fine man," Jackie said in 1981.
Jackie and Jack were wed in 1953. Lorraine and John married in 1955.
After Cooper's short service as U.S. ambassador to India and Nepal, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1956.... The Coopers settled in at 2900 N St., N.W., in Georgetown. The Kennedys bought a smaller home at 3307 N St. -- but only after Jackie asked Lorraine's approval.
...President-elect Kennedy...asked Cooper to take a secret trip to the Soviet Union and India. Kennedy was particularly keen to get Cooper's assessment of Soviet attitudes toward his incoming administration.
"I predicted a very rough time," Cooper recalled.... "Later, after Kennedy as president met with (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev in Austria, he told me, 'John, I wish I'd paid more attention. You were so right!'"
Eight days after Kennedy was sworn in as president in January 1961, he and his wife had their first dinner outside the White House at the Coopers' residence. The dinner party marked the first time a sitting president dined in the home of a lawmaker from the opposite party.
...In the next few years, the Coopers would often be guests at the White House. And the couples continued to exchange notes and seek each other's advice, according to their private papers and oral histories at the University of Kentucky, Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. --------------------------- [end excerpt -- entire article can be read online]
Yesterday here, wrote -- since members of congress don't live in Washington, they don't see the other representatives and senators in social life, school life, community life, church life, "real" life, they have no relationship with them, and they don't have incentive or often-used skills for working with them, or even talking with them. ...
The result: the
positive
aspects of our two-party, adversarial system
decline,
and the
negative
aspects of our system are
increased,
to the point where no one's having dinner together or helping each other, they're just all trying to "slime" each other, one party to the other, back and forth. It's unproductive.
When they get elected to Congress they should move to Washington and live there.
They shouldn't be an "absentee legislator." Their mental and physical energy shouldn't be used up with flying back and forth on the public's money, no doubt. They should live where they work, and learn stuff so they can do it better.
When working people's jobs were shipped overseas and communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and many other states suffered, the answer was sometimes given, with a snarky smirk, "Well they should move to where the jobs are!" (in that sing-song, playground tone). Well maybe Congress should listen to their own advice and -- "move to where their jobs are"...
If the answer to that suggestion is, "But my wife won't move to Washington!" Then I guess you don't run for Congress. Step aside and let someone who's committed to doing the work run for the job.
-----------------------------------------
On Google, type in
bright side of the road, van morrison
and listen to this song....
-30-
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