First Posted: 12/9/2013
Most of us are guided by a moral compass, comprised of a system of beliefs that determines our behaviors and the choices that we make. It’s what gives a sense of order to our lives and allows us, on some level, to demonstrate commitment to causes greater than ourselves and compassion to others. We’re committed to pay a price and not compromise our beliefs even in tough times to help to make the world a more livable place.
But, it’s that phrase on some level that are the operative words because for most of us, there are limits, boundaries we’ve established where our beliefs can be compromised when times simply get too tough.
For Nelson Mandela, whose memorial took place last week, it seems those boundaries didn’t exist. He saw a system that was on any and all levels unconscionable and was willing to oppose it and seek to change it, so much so that he was jailed for sedition, not just for a few months or even a few years but for 27 years. Broken down, that’s 9,855 days, 236,520 hours, the price of a man with principles he thought were inviolate, in essence a down payment he was willing to make to end apartheid.
And, while the price is mind-boggling to me, someone who couldn’t imagine spending even an hour in a cell, his actions upon his 1990 release are even more unfathomable. Instead of allowing waves of bitterness to wash over him against the system to which he fell victim and the captors who could only fetter him physically while his resolve remained untouched, he embraced them and spent whatever time he had left dedicated to the notion that his native country would be served better if a democracy was effected and neither white domination nor black domination prevailed.
After becoming his nation’s first black president, he went so far as accepting the previous white president, F. W. de Klerk, into his administration as his first deputy. He forgave his oppressors and worked with them for the greater good and thus stemmed the likelihood of violence between blacks and whites that would have surely ensued had he demonstrated the bitterness so many would over those 27 lost years.
Rightfully tributes poured in since the 95-year-old’s passing a week ago Thursday. The UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Mandela “a giant for justice” and said that no one did more to advance the causes of human dignity and freedom.
Similar to the men he admired so much, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, both assassinated while struggling to oppose the injustices they saw for a segment of humanity, Nelson Mandela will forever be remembered as one willing to sacrifice his very freedom for his principles in the fervent hope that there would come a time when apartheid could be consigned a place only in a chapter of a thematically arranged history book with other sweeping examples of man’s inhumanity to man.
And while the cynic may say that Mandela’s presidency and overall impact has not abolished the disparity in the country’s economic base, even in his home area of Alexandria, there is no doubt that myriad abuses of human rights no longer exist largely because he was willing to take the ultimate stand.
Upon his release from prison, it was his sense of optimism, his penchant for reconciliation and his willingness to set aside all animosities, albeit certainly justified, that surely will form a lasting legacy.
Trained as a boxer as a young man, Mandela had tenacity and resolve. Trained as a lawyer, he also had the intellect to see beyond himself to embrace a more important vision. And, the price was 27 lost years, from 45 to 72, precious years given the uncertain but most certainly finite terms that define human life.
There are those who live lives that become in many ways models to which we should all aspire. And, for those of us who surely at times come up short in our struggles to suppress ego and to stand on principle when times are tough, men like Mandela remain as much template as flesh and bones, for it was his absence of convenient conscience, in other words, standing on principle only when it’s not terribly difficult, that I’ll remember.
In another time, Founding Father Thomas Paine told his countrymen, “These are times that try men’s souls,” in urging them to fight tyranny. Mandela’s soul surely must have been tried, all 9,855 days, and for the way he emerged, as much as anything he may or may not have accomplished politically, that’s his greatest gift to all of us who strive to suppress our own convenient consciences.
