I was offline, at least metaphorically, when news broke that Nelson Mandela had passed away. Thus, I had the luxury of reflecting for a couple of days... and watching a flurry of other stories whiz past in a blur. It's remarkable how in our digital 21st century that any global event -- but especially the passing of such an iconic world leader as the freedom fighter who became South Africa's first black president -- becomes a prism through which we funnel our view of the world, no matter how narrow. Sometimes it can be silly --Mandela the movie inspiration, or Mandela the rugby enthusiast -- and sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when people with polar opposite beliefs try in some way graft his greatness onto their own cause.
But at heart. the music of Nelson Mandela and his life is what another icon of the so-called Third World, Bob Marley, might have called a redemption song, for his ideals and for the rest of us and came to believe, or at least accept, them. His notion that freedom and justice would happen for the downtrodden black people of apartheid-era South Africa -- and his ability to hold onto that belief during 27 remarkable years in prison -- never once wavered. That's because he never lost faith that the rest of the world -- the people who were calling him a "terrorist" and dismissing his pleas for equality as "communism" -- would come to the rightness of his view.
To me, what's amazing is not so much that this happened, but that it happens more than you would think. This weekend, many noted the unmistakable parallels between Mandela and the late Dr. Martin Luther King -- freedom fighters who were vilified and imprisoned early in their life, only to become great national heroes. The one difference is that in America, Dr. King didn't live to see his political beatification, a type of reverence that has both its good and weak points.