Ronald Reagan brought to fruition and prominence a conservative movement that Barry Goldwater only began. He was able by his smile, personality and humor, to cover up some of the worst parts of that movement. Today, in some of our leaders, we see the worst parts of that movement coming to fruition, and they lack the humor and grace that Reagan used to his advantage to put a smiling face on throwing the mentally ill into the streets, and allowing his government to stand by and watch as thousands died of AIDS.

But just maybe, his death will highlight the differences between his reality and the world we see today. I see the spark of this beginning in Nancy Reagan’s call for stem cell research and in Ron Reagan, Jr.’s eulogy of his father where he said, "My father saw his life after the assassination attempt as an obligation to serve God, not the mandate that others seem to think they have from God today. These are two very different things."

Chris Crane wrote in the Washington Blade about understanding the anger of those of us over 45 who see Reagan as the man who by refusing to even mention the word AIDS caused the death of thousands. I can share that anger and understand the sorrow that I heard in Larry Kramer’s comments to People magazine after Reagan’s death, and in Matt Foreman’s, Letter to Steven, in the Blade. I too think of all those friends I lost in the early days to AIDS, whose names are still in address books I can’t bring myself to throw away, because that would mean they are all really gone. Those friends with whom I was to grow old and enjoy the sunset of my life.

These thoughts and feelings clearly color how I look at the last years of Reagan’s life, but they don’t change the empathy I have for Nancy and her children who lived with Reagan’s sure and slow death for the past 10 years. It is the same life so many of us lived with our friends and lovers as we watched them suffer with AIDS.

But despite those feelings of anger and pain that are still often there, I am an optimist. I have, as so many of us in my generation did, turned our anger into building a better future. I can only hope that Nancy Reagan and her children will turn their personal grief into making a better future for others. That they won’t allow themselves to be used by the right wing which now controls the Republican Party, but that they will use their grief and hurt in a positive way so that others will not have to suffer as they did.

Having watched the pomp and ceremonies, and heard the speakers all hail Reagan as a man who saw the best in people and strove to make our country that Shining City on the Hill, any comparison to politics today should make even his most loyal supporters wince. If we listen to what all the leaders of the world’s nations that came to mourn Reagan are saying about the United States today it is hard to imagine those eulogies which talked of Reagan’s humor and the ability to bring nations together and getting policy passed, using tough words but knowing when to compromise, being applied to our leadership today.

Maybe people will hear the words of Mikhail Gorbachev, who said to Ted Koppel on Nightline, "I hope that the current leaders of the United States will look at, and learn from the past, and understand that you cannot force even Democracy on other people and nations by using guns and bombs. One must understand other nations and their people’s history and culture before you can convince them to change. What the United States is doing today is what the worst of the Bolsheviks did when they used guns and threats to turn the world to communism. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now".

Reagan was an enigma. He did work to end the cold war and he did so without starting a war, using personal diplomacy, and an ability to make people like him. But Reagan also did some terrible things and supported some terrible people around the world from Marcus to Duarte to Duvallier. I believe that history will not view his Presidency as we do now in this haze of seeing what he did through his ability to tell a joke or be the consummate communicator. But it was his ability to communicate and relate to people that will make those comparing him to politicians today see the shortcomings in today’s leaders.

Reagan had the chutzpah to stand there and say to the American people, "I still don’t believe in my heart that we gave weapons for hostages, but I guess the record show’s we did," and get away with it. Our politicians today don’t have the ability to get away with that kind of a statement, and we are the better for that.

If Nancy and the Reagan children will use their grief to bring some good to the world, to fight for stem cell research, and to make sure that today’s politicians can’t pretend that they are following Ronald Reagan’s legacy when they act as if they have a mandate from God, as Ron, Jr. stated so well, it may allow us all to feel a need to thank Ronald Reagan more in death than we ever did, or could, in life.