Honoring Senator John McCain

I’ve thought and read quite a bit about the late Senator John McCain since Saturday evening when I learned the Senator had passed. One tweet really stood out to me from Kasie Hunt (@kasie), a NBC News Correspondent on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.:

Sometimes people ask me why I want to cover politics, when it’s all so dismal.

The answer is, because people like @SenJohnMcCain believe it’s how you make a difference in this world.

Our country needs more of everything he was. May his death inspire the best among us.

He was a bipartisan leader in the U.S. Senate. He was known for saying (and I’m paraphrasing) “a plane needs 2 wings to fly.” He said this in the context of Congress. He lamented the fact that little was getting done in Congress as Congress had lost its ability to work together as 2 parties to advance critical issues for the American people. He had personally led initiatives that required bipartisan leadership.

Senator McCain was considered a “maverick” for not always doing what his party or his President wanted. I consider that to be a feature, not a bug.

It would be great if the U.S. government would spend more money and attention to fighting diseases like the Cancer Glioblastoma that took the lives of Senators McCain and Ted Kennedy rather than engaging in global conflicts that seem to come to no beneficial conclusion. Let’s go after diabetes, heart disease, all types of cancer, muscular dystrophy, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and so many others that would afford us the chance to prevent tremendous suffering in the world.

Thought for the week:

“I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure- which is: try to please everybody.” – Herbert Bayard Swope