Khazei embodies best of Massachusetts
Editor, Townsman:
I have worked with Alan Khazei for nearly 20 years, side by side serving our community and our country. Like Alan himself, I was inspired as a young man to answer President Kennedy's call to "Ask not...," and helped Alan expand City Year to meet the needs of neighborhoods from Jamaica Plain to Chicago's South Side to San Jose. Student by student, corps member by corps member, community by community - we changed the world.
Through the entire time I have worked with Khazei, I have known him as a person of utmost integrity, with perhaps the strongest "justice nerve" of anyone alive; a person of inspired innovation, who has created thousands of jobs that deliver meaning, opportunity and impact, not just paychecks or dividends; a student of important history, who appreciates that true change has always come from the power of citizens taking things into their own hands; and an unparalleled, magnetic leader, who asks for and channels the best of those around him to turn the improbable into reality.
This last quality truly distinguishes Khazei from the other candidates for U.S. Senate. Indeed, this indelible spirit of turning our best ideals into world-changing reality is what Massachusetts (and America) is about, and what we expect from our leaders and ourselves.
I have talked with dozens of voters over the past two weeks (and hundreds of other volunteers have reached tens of thousands more) and Khazei may, in fact, have the advantage down the final stretch as his ideals, message, positions and persona resonate with everyday citizens. "Undecideds" are leaning and deciding his way in big numbers. Watch out, here comes Seabiscuit!
Peter Scanlon
Newton
(Editor's note: Scanlon writes that hegrew up in Shawsheen, worked for years in his family's Main Street hardware store, and was part of the youth group at St. Augustine's parish.)
