Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
October 27, 2002
With the Praise That Grows Not Old: Remembering Paul Wellstone
A great light has gone out in Minnesota.
It is the nature of an imperfect world; planes fall out of the sky sometimes, the delicate dance of matter, technology and human judgment falters for a second, the wrong second, and lives are gone. It is utterly arbitrary; not a punishment, not a message, not a plan, just the randomness of things in a world that could have been otherwise, that ought to have been otherwise, that we expected to be otherwise. It happens every day, in one form or another, to ordinary people -- a car accident, an unsuspected embolism, a carelessly lighted match - and suddenly someone's place in the circle of friends is vacant, and we are surprised again by the fragility of life. Such small communities of grieving are everywhere. Do not be deceived; goodness perishes every day, and sorrow becomes the measure of someone's love.
But this public loss is some way different. We mourn today for a man that many of us never met in person, and others glimpsed only in the spotlight of public appearance. Something larger than our personal friendship circles is diminished by his death, and yet we feel it with an intensity magnified by our shared incomprehension and pain. Senator Paul Wellstone was a figure in our collective civic life, and we Minnesotans tend to take that life personally, and seriously. His role, as a member of the Senate in Washington, as a candidate, as a liberal, a rabble-rouser, an advocate, was unique, and our conversation in this state about the future of government has been woven for twelve years around his convictions as a dependable frame of reference. In his absence, the upcoming election falls from a well-defined contest of ideas, to an amorphous process of uncertainties and speculation. It will be long before those who, like me, believe in much of what he stood for, find another such champion.
But I do not think that this momentary political chaos is the chief source of the popular feeling of bewilderment and sorrow. It is not the accuracy with which Paul Wellstone assessed the public mood and will, nor even the dexterity with which he had learned to operate in the complex machinery of federal government, that calls forth our tears, our blessings on his memory, and our still fathomless sense of loss. Rather, I would suggest, what we know is suddenly gone from our midst is that rare alchemy of skill, conviction, and personal presence that constitute real leadership. This quality was discernible even to those who disagreed with some or most of Wellstone's specific public policy agenda. And it is, I would further suggest, this quality that we must ultimately seek to carry forward ourselves, when we have moved through our disbelief and our tears, and begin to consider the living memorial that will be his legacy to Minnesota and the world.
It will be for other more astute observers of the national scene than I to make a definitive analysis of Paul Wellstone's character and political career. What I would do this morning, as we sit together in our civic bereavement, is to lift up four aspects of what has drawn my admiration and respect to him; things that his example has taught me about the function of leadership, and that I will attempt to integrate into my own life and work as he showed us all.
The first element of leadership that was so evident in Paul Wellstone was his enthusiasm for the work of politics itself. It seems clear that he reveled in the process of creating connections, of bringing people together to consider how they might improve their common life. Union organizing, neighborhood organizing, precinct organizing; it was all the same, his fundamental impulse to weave what we would call the interconnected web. It wasn't just that this kind of structure was the one he could afford, or the one to which his message appealed; his heart was in the grass roots first and last. He typified the bumper sticker assertion that 'the most radical thing we can do is to introduce people to one another.' Early in his career, Wellstone organized welfare recipients in Rice County, and farmers to fight bankruptcies, and so effectively did he communicate his faith in the power of dedicated groups, that his students at Carleton College implemented his own lessons to save their popular professor's job and win him tenure. He believed, at a deeply visceral level, that ordinary people, armed with information and working together effectively, could accomplish just about anything, and he clearly found energy and excitement from watching that happen and being part of it. On election day, you would find him on the back of the green bus, driving through Twin Cities neighborhoods with his bullhorn, urging people to get out and vote - whether or not they intended to vote for him. Paul Wellstone believed passionately in the endless possibilities offered by the democratic process, and that process, with all its risks and struggles and compromises, commanded his loyalty and joyfully shaped his career. He had a profound vocation for political life and the political process, and his evident appetite for the work he chose reminds me that all of us lead best when we are engaged with processes that we believe in and care about, when we are doing work that calls forth our best energy, and gives us deep satisfaction.
Paul Wellstone was also widely known for his commitment to those who are sometimes referred to as 'little' people - but they were never little to Paul. Rather, they were the source of his most trusted information about how the world really was. He would sit down in the midst of a table full of troubled teens at a juvenile detention center, listening to the stories of their lives in and out of state custody. He would gather panels of single mothers on welfare, to find out how they survived, what they needed, what did and didn't help them. In Washington, he worked out with the guards from the capitol building in their police gym, and he knew the elevator operators by name. He made a point of recognizing and making friends with the laborers who moved his furniture, the cooks and waiters who prepared the meals he ate. He was adamant in his support of America's veterans, and took pride in the claim that no veteran had ever called his office for assistance in vain. He wanted to hear about the lives and work of small farmers, of union laborers, of check out clerks. Arising from his own life experience of caring for his older brother, he was intensely concerned for the rights and the well being of the mentally ill. He had an impressive gift for remembering names, together with the conviction that every person, no matter what their status, had something to teach him, some important information to contribute to his decision making. And anyone who had difficulty claiming justice for themselves had an advocate in Paul Wellstone; children, especially those in poverty, abused women, immigrants, the old and the ill. For him they were not objects of pity - not 'little' people - but rather the measure of the nation's nobility, for no success could justify their suffering, just as no personal achievement could ever raise him above interest and concern for those he encountered in their various functions along his daily path. That authentic connection to those around us is a quality of leadership; it is when we honestly want to know what the world is like through the eyes of others that we become able both to show forth visions of what might be possible, and also to reflect back what is broken in our communities, so that we might begin the work of healing.
Another part of what made Wellstone effective as a senator was his capacity for discipline, and his respect for the rules of whatever system he was functioning with. As much as he valued knowing what the people most affected by legislative action thought, he was also an academic, a Ph.D. and tenured professor, who had US history and Nobel Prize winning economic theories at his fingertips. His persistent energy was legendary, even among the over-achieving members of the senate. Paul arrived in this exclusive club after his surprise victory over incumbent Senator Rudy Boschwitz in 1990, with perhaps a greater supply of rough edges than most. He got off to a rocky start with then president George Bush senior, and reportedly irritated both his colleagues and his own staff. But he applied his intelligence to the ways in which the body of which he was now a member actually functioned, and began to make both personal friends and bi-partisan political alliances. He became an astute manager of the arcane legislative processes, throwing himself into the business of the senate with typical enthusiasm, yet never losing the ideal of voting his genuine conscience. Understanding the practical realities of his work never corrupted his commitment to his passionate values, nor did his idealism prevent him from learning to move as effectively in the halls of government as he once had on the wrestling mat.
But surely the thing that we shall remember longest and best about this man and his leadership will be his astonishing courage. In a world that bows to the least common denominator of popular preference, in a profession that follows opinion polls with slavish attention, he spoke his mind with honesty and vigor. He made it look easy, as if it were the only thing he could do, but he was never unaware of the potential cost. From the activism of his early days as a professor, that nearly ended his appointment at Carleton, to his insistence on conducting election campaigns with integrity and a positive message, to his vote against the popular welfare reform package on the eve of his first re-election, to his most recent stand as the only senator facing re-election to vote against the president's Iraq war authorization, he spoke and acted and voted his conscience. There is an old-fashioned word for such behavior, a word that we modern Americans have all but ejected from our vocabulary; perhaps one way to cherish the memory of Paul Wellstone would be to restore it to an active role in our assessment of ourselves and our leaders. He had a clear conception of his duty, of what was required of him as a person of integrity with the power, as he believed we all have the power, to change the world. Duty was not, for him, something imposed by circumstances and grudgingly satisfied as lightly as possible in order to keep out of trouble. Rather, duty was what came of having convictions and connections, the positive moral energy of believing in people, in principles and in possibilities, and it was fulfilled by bringing those resources together to shape a future of justice and peace and human dignity for all. Duty took him to the highest chambers of government, and duty took him on to the small chartered airplanes he dreaded, that he might know us and serve us and inspire us to the leadership that he believed was in all of us.
Some day, no doubt, the inevitable marble statue or bronze bust of Paul Wellstone will be offered as a tribute to his honor and our remembrance. That is not a bad thing, but it is, as Pericles said so long ago, with living memorials that we must build a new world. I am moved to recall a sonnet written by Edna St. Vincent Millay for the unveiling of a statue in tribute to three of the heroines of the womens suffrage movement, in which she contrasts the image of that static memorial to an envisioned flag of the movement to which these women had given so much of their lives. One can hear in her words the impatient accents of our progressive senator, whose presence we might well still feel, in the wind that rattles the stout door of privilege, and troubles the ashes of conscience and courage in our own sheltered grates. His spirit will wait for us not where his poor, broken body shall lie, nor in the solemn images of veneration that we may create to solace ourselves, but out in the world he embraced, among the people he strove to serve; in the chambers of government, 'the forum of his silenced cry;' and wherever shall fly the flags of justice and human decency in the hands of ordinary people bound together by extraordinary dreams.
Upon this marble bust that is not I
Lay your round, formal wreath that is not fame;
But in the forum of my silenced cry
Root now the living tree whose sap is flame.
I, that was proud and valiant, am no more -
Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
This stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
Only my standard on a taken hill
Can cheat the mildew and the red brown rust
And make immortal my adventurous will.
Even now the silk is tugging at the staff;
Take up the song, forget the epitaph.
Benediction:
Having given his life for the common good, may he receive the praise that grows not old, and rest in the noblest of tombs, where his glory is laid up to be remembered always, proclaimed in both word and deed. For the whole earth is the monument of valorous men; let their virtues be commemorated not only by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but live on with unwritten memorials, graven not in stone, but in the hearts of all humanity.