"Danny was elected to the U.S. Senate when I was 2 years old. He had been elected to Congress a couple of years before I was born. He would remain my senator until I left Hawaii for college.
"Now, even though my mother and grandparents took great pride that they had voted for him, I confess that I wasn’t paying much attention to the United States Senate at the age of 4 or 5 or 6. It wasn’t until I was 11 years old that I recall even learning what a U.S. senator was, or it registering, at least. …
"My mother that summer would turn on the TV every night … and watch the Watergate hearings. And I can’t say that I understood everything that was being discussed, but I knew the issues were important. I knew they spoke to some basic way about who we were and who we might be as Americans. …
"And the person who fascinated me most was this man of Japanese descent with one arm, speaking in this courtly baritone, full of dignity and grace. And maybe he captivated my attention because my mom explained that this was our senator and that he was upholding what our government was all about. Maybe it was a boyhood fascination with the story of how he had lost his arm in a war. But I think it was more than that.
"Now, here I was, a young boy with a white mom, a black father, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. And I was beginning to sense how fitting into the world might not be as simple as it might seem. And so to see this man, this senator, this powerful, accomplished person who wasn’t out of central casting when it came to what you’d think a senator might look like at the time, and the way he commanded the respect of an entire nation, I think it hinted to me what might be possible in my own life. …
"This was a man who as a teenager stepped up to serve his country even after his fellow Japanese-Americans were declared enemy aliens; a man who believed in America even when its government didn’t necessarily believe in him. That meant something to me. It gave me a powerful sense — one that I couldn’t put into words — a powerful sense of hope. …
"Danny once told his son his service to this country had been for the children, or all the sons and daughters who deserved to grow up in a nation that never questioned their patriotism. ‘This is my country,’ he said. Many of us have fought hard for the right to say that … but my point is, is that when he referred to our sons and daughters, he wasn’t just talking about Japanese-Americans. He was talking about all of us. He was talking about those who serve today who might have been excluded in the past. He’s talking about me.
"And that’s who Danny was. For him, freedom and dignity were not abstractions. They were values that he had bled for, ideas he had sacrificed for, rights he understood as only someone can who has had them threatened, had them taken away …
"May God bless Daniel Inouye. And may God grant us more souls like his."
