We’re just over the halfway point of the year. Now this year, 2020 has been much on our minds because it will give us, we trust, on November 3rd, the long awaited presidential election. Assuming that Trump doesn’t succeed with his efforts to sabotage the election in his own favor, mainly by lowering the numbers of anti-Trump eligible voters, President Trump will turn into Mr. Trump from one day to the next.
And Mr. Trump will become the most favored target of any number of state attorney Generals and prosecutors, all in line to pursue Mr. Trump for any number of corruption charges , not the least of which being the charge of treating the United States government as his own private playground subject to no laws or limits other than those of his own invention.
Now I have a number of WordPress blogs, 8 of them altogether, of which 6 are kept hidden. The other two, Quatrevingtans and My-Journal, are not hidden, are public. The latter two are the principal carriers of my own thoughts, along with the thoughts of a multitude of others who probably like me are out of school, but still my teachers.
My blogs contain my own thoughts which are and have been for most of my adult life, the “things,” mostly the words, that I hold most dear. There are countless ideas contained therein, hundreds, thousands, of the ideas of others, with frequently a few of my own. Although I might ask how many of us has ever had an idea that has not been usually better expressed by others, probably many others at another and earlier, or much earlier time?
There are many men and women whom I admire, for their words which are usually within my reach, but also for their actions not so much within my reach. There are a large number of these individuals and I won’t try now to list them, but there are a few at the top of my list, two of these being Hannah Arendt whom I call the teller of truths so terribly needed in this untruth time of Donald Trump and his enablers, and Nelson Mandela no less a truth teller but also throughout his life a man of action.
Mandela was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state. He went on to serve 27 years in prison on Robben Island, Pollsmoor and Victor Verster Prisons.
Hannah Arendt
century.
Hannah Arendt orn into a German-Jewish family, Hannah was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and first lived in Paris for the next eight years, before moving to New York. To learn more go to Richard Bernstein. “Why read Hannah Arendt Now?”
Nelson Mandela
Number two on my list is Nelson Mandela who lived his whole life, in South Africa, almost by himself making the country that had been an area home to 10 or more tribes, in the process. Now he is admired throughout the world, no less than M LK and Mahatma Ghandi, admired as a man of action, an anti-apartheid revolutionary, a political leader and philanthropist, and who served , following his release from Robbin Island, as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
Angela Merkel
And what about this person, Angela Merkel, a truth teller and woman of action, also another person whom I greatly admire,
Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German politician who has been Chancellor of Germany since 2005. She served as the Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 2000 to 2018. She has been widely described as the de facto leader of the European Union and the most powerful woman in the world.
What I remember about Chancellor Merkel is her decision, alone of the Western democracies, including the United States, to keep country’s borders open thereby allowing some 1 million+ mostly Syrian refugees to freely enter Germany.
A mmigrant takes a photo with Angela Markel outside a refugee camp in Berlin in September 2015.
Was she right to do so? I would say yes, much as we have been right to allow millions of migrants and refugees to freely enter our country. Old countries, like Germany and now ourselves are always in need of new people with new ideas. We also need leaders like Angela Merkel but in my life time there have been far too few. There have been Nelson Mandela and Angela Merkel.
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