This evening in Minneapolis, Minnesotans will mourn the death of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., who was killed in a plane crash last Friday along with his wife, his daughter and three staff members.
While Wellstone's district lines technically ended at Minnesota's borders and his affiliation with Wisconsin was limited primarily to a professional relationship with likeminded U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., Wellstone embodied much of the same \flaming"" liberalism that distinguished Madison as a city and a university for several decades.
Both before and after his death, Wellstone has been characterized as a liberal, as a man on the fringe of his own party and an ideological dissenter who held stubbornly to his views. But it is worth noting that he embraced liberal ideology when it was unpopular and chose actively not to compromise his opinions for the sake of political unity when dozens did.
Wellstone lived by the same philosophy he taught. Before his own upset grassroots victory to the Senate in 1990, he led a class on grassroots campaigns and was arrested alongside his students during his tenure as a professor of political science at Carleton College.
Furthermore, the senator was famous statewide for his contact with Minnesotans, no matter where they were. It was not uncharacteristic for him to attend a Fourth of July parade in small towns or attend the funeral of a state legislator's family member in lieu of fund-raisers in his honor and he died as he lived: tirelessly devoted to the citizens of his state.
And as we take this time to look back on the life of the distinguished senator from Minnesota and the lives he touched'from his roots as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and the rural farmers of his district to the disaffected college students he taught and the millions of people beyond his state borders, it becomes clearer that Wellstone wasn't the extremist he was accused of being, but rather an extraordinary, uncompromising man.
Let this provide an opportunity to re-evaluate, as individuals and as a community, our commitment to our own ideology and reinforce our will to stand up for those views'in whatever form they might take.
We could learn a thing or two from Wellstone's example.
