No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
- Nelson Mandela
Few have truly have an opportunity to change the world. Fewer still can manage to pull it off without engaging in personal pettiness and discord. The desire to exact a measure of revenge for perceived wrongs done to us is part of what makes us human. What we too often don’t realize is that hatred, anger, and bitterness aren’t emotions we’re born with. Every now and again, though, someone comes along who reminds us that hatred and giving into our darker angels are learned behaviors. We don’t exit the wound hating, we don’t innately despise and desire to oppress those who are different; we learn those things from the people in our lives.
Nelson Mandela has always been a symbol of what can happen when you refuse to allow hatred to cloud your thoughts and action. After spending 27 years in South Africa’s prisons, Mandela embraced his captors when he finally walked out a free man. His heart remained untainted by anger and bitterness, something that requires an almost unimaginable equanimity and strength of character. How many among us would have the strength to endure 27 years as a political prisoner without publicly exhibiting a trace of resentment or desire for retribution? In his private moments, I suspect that Mandela, like any of us would, fought his demons. Unlike so many of us, he found a way to tame those demons and live a life that to the outside world appeared untarnished by hatred, jealousy, and the desire for retribution. He survived and ultimately helped to defeat apartheid, and he did it without demanding that “justice be done” to those responsible for the atrocities committed by the government of the old South Africa.
As the father of modern South Africa lies gravely ill in a hospital bed, people around the world are considering Mandela’s legacy. If he survives, Mandela will turn 95 on July 18th. Born during the final months of World War I, Nelson Mandela has over the course of a long and productive live served as an example of what life can be when one banishes hatred from their heart. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.
Would that we could see our way clear to learning that lesson and adding yet another accomplishment to Mandela’s legacy. It would be a fitting tribute.
