His column today is titled A Lesson Before Dying and I am quite sure he is aware of the book of that title.
There is little one can add to his words, but allow me to think aloud a bit, but only after offering you his opening three paragraphs:
One of the great lights of the world went dark on Thursday. Nelson Mandela left this world, having enormously altered it.
And yet, the extraordinary example that he set lives on and provides a lesson — a blueprint — for all of us who still labor for justice, equality and freedom.
Be convinced of your cause. Conviction, character and consistency are sorely lacking in our modern era of fame-chasing, poll-testing and comment-reading. The status quo has a way of lulling the masses into complacency and acceptance. It’s known and familiar. There are always those whose lives are comfortable and whose livelihoods are secure under it.
Please keep reading.
Blow offers many additional lessons to be learned from the life of Mandela.
This is the third diary about Mandela related things I have posted today.
I do not apologize for doing so.
His passing, which of course we knew would soon be upon us for a man in his mid 90s, is nevertheless an opportunity to learn from his tremendous, and challenging, example.
I doubt that I could be as resilient in 27 years of captivity, and while I would like to be generous, would struggle to be as generous as he was with his jailers, whom he included in the front row at his inauguration as President of the Republic of South Africa.
I am still younger than he was when released from prison.
At 67 I have lived 2 decades longer than did my mother.
I have watched the world around me change drastically, not always for the better - specifically when I consider the environmental degradation that threatens our planet.
And yet when I might otherwise be prone to despair there are examples that lift me up.
It can be the words of Martin Luther King that still, more than four and half decades after his assassination, can inspire and motivate me.
It can be the quiet commitment of something like Habitat for Humanity, founded by a devout member of the Disciples of Christ which got its biggest boost from a then Southern Baptist President named Jimmy.
It is watching a student who struggles with learning and/or with the effect of poverty from which s/he comes nevertheless persist at a time when some of my more advantaged and "talented" students are willing to settle for less.
It can be something as simple as the love and trust of the domestic animals that are a major part of my life.
It is certainly watching my spouse go forward with her treatment for her cancer, including taking on the burdens of her stem cell transplant, the concomitant loss of her long beautiful hair and the debilitating impact upon her energy, yet nevertheless remain positive of the world and her place in it.
Sometimes what inspires or motivates us is from the common place things and people around us.
Sometimes we need to be reminded of that by the extraordinary things of people like Mandela, who someone do not lose their ability to touch, to connect with, ordinary people.
Blow is a gifted writer, whose words often move me to post about them here, to offer my responses to them.
Blow, like Mandela, would tell us it is not about him. It is about us, our ability to make a difference, to keep our eyes on the prize, as the old Civil Rights song reminded us.
At the end of his next to last paragraph, Blow offers this lesson from Mandela:
Demonstrating kindness to those who have treated you cruelly is an act of moral supremacy. It is the most powerful of human exercises, because in so doing, you conquer the self and diminish your enemy.
I prefer to think of it another way. As a Quaker I believe in the saying of George Fox that I should would gladly across the earth answering that of God in each man I encounter. The hard part for me has always been the "gladly" part of that. When we would read Winnie the Pooh (which I first did in Latin in high school and later in German in college) somehow, perhaps appropriately at the time, I would always read Eeyore - not exactly an exemplar of being glad about the world. I still struggle with that.
But the ANSWERING presumes the best about the other person, even if they refuse that description of themselves. In the Orthodox Christianity of which I was a part for 14 years, in which I married my wife who remains in that church, we are to look at fellow human beings as living icons of the almighty God who assumed human form through incarnation as Jesus Christ. Scripture asks how we can claim to love God whom we cannot see when we hate our brother whom we can? TO hate one's brother seems to me a denial of the notion of the redemptive message at the heart of Christianity, that Jesus died so that ALL men could be saved.
I do not, as one who does not really consider himself a Christian nor who worries about a heavenly based deity, view that in a moralistic or legalist accounting. Rather, it is too me that no person can ultimately put themselves beyond the possibility of redemption, that no matter how much deliberate evil one may have done, it is possible at least in this life to take responsibility, acknowledge, and begin to make amends. That is what the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa attempted to address.
So thus we get to hope - to the idea the positive change is possible.
That is a message that resonated in the election of 2008, put forth by a relatively young politician who acknowledged his debt to Mandela.
And that leads me to the final paragraph in Blow's powerful and instructive op ed:
Finally, remember that all things are possible for those of strong will and unwavering perseverance. Those who can’t imagine change reveal the deficits of their imaginations, not the difficulty of change. As Mandela put it, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
I suppose that despite exhaustion and a 45 mile commute each way why I continue in my current teaching job, having returned to the challenge of classroom teaching despite having a pension and social security - trust me, it is not for the money.
I suspect that is why many here persist in our various endeavors, in politics and in other arenas, even when at time the situation seems beyond our best efforts, when we worry whether we have been betrayed by those on whose behalf we labored so hard.
It is not about them.
It is about us.
all things are possible for those of strong will and unwavering perseverance - are we willing to make that commitment ourselves?
It always seems impossible until its done
to which I add it is impossible if we do not try, and try again, and try again.
Thank you Charles M. Blow for a magnificent piece.
Thank you Nelson Mandela for the live you lived and the example you set.