Why I'm Not Sad at Mandela's Passing

“Loss of life is to be mourned, but only if the life was wasted.”

Nelson Mandela showed what is possible for our world and within each one of us - if we believe, dream and work together.

I perhaps have a different relationship with death; I don't fear it as other people do.  I have come to recognize death for what it is - not so much an undiscovered country as the road to awe.  We tend to focus on death as an ending, but really, there's something to all this circle of life, ashes to ashes business.  

What we are is recycled material, old words put together in new sentences in a story that is continuously being written.  It's as true of biology (what genes we pass on to our children; how our raw material gets recycled into the earth, a tree, a seed and eventually, another animal) as it is of culture (the ideas we pass on, the legacies we leave behind).

Nelson Mandela was a world-changer as much by what he did as by how he lived.  In a time where we have a growing crop of selfish, bitter leaders who put their own interests before those of their people - who have lost their way - Mandela was different.  

Everyone talks about his humility, his lack of vindictiveness when he had every right in the world to hate - and how by his very being, he served as an inspiration, a superhero of a leader in our midst.

What Mandela has done - the words he shared, the deeds he has accomplished and the model he set for others - will never be undone.  That he himself has passed is not sad; death is a journey we all must take and Mandela lived a good long life of accomplishment that anyone of us could only aspire to.

But he is gone now - we no longer have any one in our midst to look to as that leader, that role model.

Those who hold the reigns of power no longer have a better leader than themselves to adulate, and in so doing abdicate their own responsibility to lead.

A giant has left the earth but what he stood for, what we all admired about him still remains.  It has to be thus.

Like any agent of change, it is the role of the Master to show us what is possible, but the day inevitably comes when they must pass on and it falls to others to pick up their torch.  This is how great leaders inspire movements.

Nelson Mandela the man is dead - he has, as the euphemism goes, passed on.  But to pass on implies someone else is picking up.  

In this way, Mandela has not left us, nor will he leave us - he has extended a gift, the light of his vision for humanity, to the rest of us.

It's a daunting prospect, this - stretching out our hand, taking the weight of responsibility, trying to aspire to be more than perhaps we are.  We are only human, after all - Mandela seemed to be so much more.  We're afraid to rise up to that level; we're afraid we might fall.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

  - Nelson Mandela

Fear is what divides us but when we overcome it, we find something else we've been missing - hope.

Let's keep the fire burning.

It's Never The Crime, But the Coverup That Condemns Us

"Torture is at the very centre of these prosecutions. Unless these trials are moved to a system with traditional due process protections, we face the shameful possibility that Khadr and others will be convicted with statements that were literally beaten out of them."

 

 

Omar Khadr is coming home.

 

There's not a lot of sympathy for Khadr here at home.  The general impression is that he's a bad kid, a soldier-killer from a bad family.  A psychologist has even suggested Khadr is "evil."  All of this, of course, is based on the impressions we have been given by governments, the military and the media.  None of us really know Omar Khadr as a person, not at all.  He hasn't been allowed to be one since 2002, when he was fifteen years old.

 

Once back in Canada, though, all of that landed perception is going to be challenged.  Looking at the evidence, there's already a pretty compelling case to be made that the handling of Khadr was a complete bungle in which many were complicit.  Sadly, this isn't a story without precedent - remember Maher Arar?

It could very well turn out that Khadr didn't kill Christopher Speer, was tortured into admitting he committed the crime while he himself was severely wounded and all this happening while he was 15 years old - a child in the eyes of the law.
 

Of course, the facts won't matter to some.  They've already made up their minds; anything else will be interpreted as spin by sympathizers or the whine of bleeding hearts.  There's a word for this confabulated justification of emotional responses - bigotry.

 

We keep telling ourselves that we are fighting against those who seek to destroy Western Civilization as embodied by freedom of person, freedom of speech and blind justice - yet we're narrowing that definition to exclude those we don't like.

Maybe it's time we start re-evaluating whether the greatest threat comes from troubles lapping at our shores, or from willful ignorance within our borders.

Keep The Candle Burning

"Soon, many Afrikaners were calling themselves Doppers, after the little metal caps with which they snuffed out candles.  They called themselves doppers because they were deliberately and consciously extinguishing the light of the Enlightenment, so that they could do what they had to do in darkness."

      - Rian Malan, My Traitor's Heart

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

The suppression of knowledge. 

An assault on reason.

The misrepresentation of facts. 

Government lying to the people. 

Government disregarding the people.

Policies being bundled in impossibly large packages with details being hidden from you.

The Harper Conservatives will tell us they're not the first to act this way.  They would be correct on that point.

The Enlightenment was seen as a turning point in Western Civilization, where we began to emerge from the Dark Ages into a time where reason, knowledge and compassion ruled.  If we want to keep it that way, we're going to have to light the way forward from within. 

UPDATE Sept 23/13: "This is more than an attack on academic freedom.  It is an attempt to guarantee public ignorance."

Forgive them, lord...

UPDATIER 11/11/13: "I think not publishing the leaks puts [people] in danger because when you have a system of government in which people can exercise great power in the dark, that's what is dangerous," he said.