Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela has passed away.

This was a man who spent a great deal of his life in prison and the bulk of it under apartheid.  Apart-hate.

Experts will argue and write books and treatises and go on highbrow talk shows to blather knowingly about his life and legacy. I’m not one of those experts. I mean, I do blather but not knowingly.

What I am is a guy who just knows what he’s read in the news. That he came out of those years of incarceration to lead a movement that overcame a truly hateful regime and then turned around and offered the olive branch to his people’s former oppressors.

He was a great man, a great human. And it’s difficult to imagine South Africa going through its transformative last twenty years without him. He was one of those folks who serves as a conscience for the world.

I find myself wondering where we’ll get our next Nelson Mandela. It would be a big good thing if we always had at least one somewhere in this world.