Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

"'Now I Can Die in Peace'" .. forgive me for just repeating two paragraphs from yours, for now ..

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"No other contemporary political leader insisted so regularly that he was just an “ordinary man” who’d simply done his duty as he understood it. Few world leaders were as relentlessly self-critical, either. In diary notes, collected in Conversations with Myself [ http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Myself-Nelson-Mandela/dp/0312611684 ], Mandela regularly emphasized his “weaknesses, errors, and indiscretions,” as if arguing against the more heroic version from his bestselling autobiography, which is also the basis of the feature film by Anant Singh that virtually sanctifies him. In an entry in 1998, he ended on a stunningly self-lacerating note: “One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” Mandela felt particularly aggrieved about the myriad ways he felt sure he’d failed his own family, and also his countrymen.

His talk to the small crowd in the village of his birth underscored this message. Many political leaders remain stubbornly sure of their singularly heroic qualities and indispensable roles in society, in life, in history. In effect, the man celebrated as the father of modern South Africa kept insisting, instead, upon his own dispensability. Of course, his periodic expressions of such humility had the opposite effect of the one he apparently intended, inspiring even more ardent waves of admiration. The last time I saw him, after the World Cup in 2010, Mandela greeted my son and me with a little joke: “Ah, it’s nice that the young people still come around to see an old man even though he has nothing new to say.” We laughed, but I thought there was a nice needle wrapped inside the quip. He seemed to be saying that his contribution to the creation of a new kind of society—non-racial, non-sexist, anti-homophobic, and more egalitarian—was over, but his visitors ought to feel free to ask themselves what they’d done recently to move the world closer to that ideal."
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as they say so much about the man, and about so many of us who sometimes spend too much time thinking we could have done more .. it's wonderful to think that such a great man died is his very own space of personal peace .. actually, lol, i'm just thinking now that is one place which would be a good place for all of we lesser mortals to be aiming for ..

GOOD BYE NELSON MANDELA .. it is good to know so many people will remember you for what your essence
was .. inclusiveness, kindness, goodness and reconciliation .. reconciliation with others, as well as with yourself ..