With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley...

Contemplating the 47-year Senate career which not only ended before passing his signature bill, but was immediately followed by the seat being captured by a Republican, with the one remaining Kennedy in elected office being a joke of a US Representative in RI who has already reached his peak. I was not a fan of Ted Kennedy, or any of the other Kennedys, but there's a lesson for all of us in seeing how quickly the overwhelming wealth and power which he represented just evaporates. As the teacher said,

Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless. What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? ... There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow...

This is not the feeling that I expected to start the day after with, and I enjoy gloating and schadenfreude as much as anyone else, but that turns out to be the first thing that I want to say...

I met a traveller from a New Eng-land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand on the Cape....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Teddy Kennedy, Lion of the Senate,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."