“A Kansas Star That Truly Shined Through Difficulty”
As former Senator Bob Dole is laid to rest, his Kansas roots shine through.
“Dwight Eisenhower said America is best described by the word ‘freedom’- it’s an all-purpose sort of word, one that we salute like the flag on the Fourth of July, even if no two of us define it in exactly the same way,” wrote former Senator Bob Dole in his final op-ed, began by hand in October, finished in November, and published after his passing on Sunday.
In it, Dole wrote about America’s squabbles over the meaning of freedom, calling it the, “perpetual tug of war between those on the left who look to an activist government to broker economic security and a level playing field without which democratic capitalism can degenerate into mere survival of the fittest, and those on the right who pursue freedom from — especially from heavy-handed dictation, stifling taxes or overregulation that can smother individual initiative and discourage social mobility.”
Dole was concerned, as so many astute political observers are, about the level of incivility in politics today. None of this was in evidence at his funeral service on Friday, however, where Republicans and Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder to mourn his passing in a rare showing of public unity.