Entourage of Homage

The world finds itself needful of those rare individuals whose experience and leadership sets them apart from the ordinary in their readiness to sacrifice themselves to a larger ideal, envisioning a world that they wish to prepare to exist as a more humane, and worthwhile one. These extraordinary figures -- people who appear as startlingly unexpected as a meteor shooting too close to Earth's atmosphere, burn with the passion of their idealism, their incandescent passion and assurance that they are right and the aggregate of society is wrong -- captivate the imagination of those whom they entrance.

These are people afflicted with all the failings of most ordinary human beings who reduce their potential by succumbing to the emotional afflictions of selfishness above the common good. It is the means by which nature has equipped her creatures to survive, after all. Humans are not self-sacrificing organisms like colonizing organisms for whom the colony's survival is the goal, not the individual organism. But these rare specimens are also capable of rising above their puny human traits when occasion demands, and it is to one of those whom the world now pays tribute.

The passage of time and the birth and development of some people imbued with special gifts has provided various societies with geniuses, people whose minds are capable of operating on a level of understanding, clarity and vision that transcends the plodding thought-process of most human beings. They have generally excelled in a particular field; physics, the plastic arts, music, literature, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and occasionally overlapping as Leonardo da Vinci was capable of doing, from art to philosophy, mechanics to rare invention.

Some men's minds have been consumed with the nature of humanity and the potential invested in humans to accomplish more than the sum of humanity's racial parts. Condemning the notion of superiority and advantage and entitlements based on a belief in the plurality of race, with the understanding that despite cosmetic evolutionary and social-custom differences based on geography and climate, the human race is one, and in the sense of its common attributes, equal.

Nelson Mandela was a man who rejected the imposed forced status quo of his native South Africa. He felt himself and his people to be equal in their potential to any measure that white Eurasians claimed superior to black Africans. Like Martin Luther King Jr., in a country that found itself unwilling to cast aside the racial divides that kept people distant from one another, enslaving one half and empowering the other, Nelson Mandela felt that black South Africans were the equal of any migrating white settlers.

People with sound open minds found no difficulty in absorbing his message, for it was a message that they themselves had naturally through their inbred sense of justice, arrived at on their own. To give former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney his due in this matter, he was one such person of courageous conviction, and he did his best to use his position and his country's influence to bring his counterparts around to the support of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.

The ANC was a legitimate political party whose aspiration was to be viewed as such, to give all South Africans the opportunity to choose finally and fairly between their societal-equalizing agenda and that of the Apartheid government's political-social agenda. To be fair to many white South Africans the prevailing situation of Apartheid presented them with a troubled conscience. The world had passed them by in its generalized disposal in the dustheap of history of the malignancy of racial disharmony.

Canada has a legitimate reason to take pride that under Mr. Mulroney's government this country was a guiding light to human freedom. It is fitting that Prime Minister Stephen Harper pay his respects as current political head of Canada, inviting his predecessor-prime ministers to accompany him on the trip to give tribute to the advent and success of Mr. Mandela's life mission to free his country from its racial divide. On that official government flight crowded with a who's who of Canadian politics and society, Canada pays its due respects.

To an exceptional man who had his full share of human-inspired deficits, but who nonetheless led his country toward a better future. That the better future he envisioned has not yet been fully realized and may never achieve that goal is not necessarily for his personal lack of trying. His successors have been dismal, the country's plight of social malfunctions are endemic and if anything growing increasingly more dysfunctional.

For the time being, however, the world assembles to pay homage to a man whose vision and determination prevailed against a systematic and dreadful impoverishment of the human soul.