The measure of greatness

BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi

The greatness of Nelson Mandela lies not in his having achieved and wielded power. It lies in his having relinquished power voluntarily at the height of such power.  

I heard this insight on the Nobel Peace Prize laureate one evening about this time  nine years ago. The point was shared by a former South African student activist who worked for Mandela’s African National Congress in its years of struggle against apartheid, or white minority rule.

            

The encounter with the activist was in mid-September, 2004 in Barcelona. That was when Mikhail Gorbachev, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, delivered a scathing  opening speech in the World Urban Forum hosted by Spain’s second biggest city.

Separated from the forum delegates and limited to the exhibit we were manning outside the conference hall, student Jerry Caasi and I didn’t know Gorbachev had spoken. We learned it the following day, through a copy of the conference newsletter.

“Enough is enough,” Gorbachev told the delegates: mayors, urban planners and policy makers, top government bureaucrats, “civil society” workers, other people of stature and others who, I thought were just like us  -- just lucky to have reached Barcelona .

            

Gorbachev’s message was a searing indictment of tokenism, of the wide gap between form and substance, the disunity between theory and practice, between pledge and action in addressing extreme poverty since the world’s leaders signed the UN Millennium Declaration in September, 2000.

            

“We are not living up to our commitments, we are not rising to the challenge,” Gorbachev said. “I am here today to declare that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Enough broken promises, enough lame excuses.”

            

Like Mandela, Gorbachev gracefully yielded political power. After introducing “glasnost” and other democratic reforms that eventually undermined his power, he stepped aside as leader of the Soviet Union to allow its member-nations to achieve independence and chart their own destiny.

He knew of where he spoke and speaks. After yielding the presidency, he went on to found Green Cross International, that prestigious group now at the forefront of grounded environmental and development work.

Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years in his fight against apartheid, was catapulted to power when he was elected president in South Africa ’s first multiracial elections in 1994. At the end of his term in 1999, at the height of his popularity, he relinquished power. Today,

Mandela remains the revered, unifying symbol in South Africa ’s – and the world’s -  struggle towards stability, peace and development. And greatness. His mere presence or endorsement of a charitable, humanitarian or any cause to improve the lives of people and communities, assurance that even a seemingly intangible program will take off the ground and be fleshed out. When he turned 91 on July 18, 2009,  he made a fresh pitch for the campaign against AIDS.

            

So did President Corazon Aquino, the wife and mother with the widow’s might, .achieve power - only to yield it voluntarily.  She remains our revered, a unifying symbol as a nation, an inspiration to the rest of the world for the bloodless people’s revolution she led in 1986 that influenced  their own nations’ struggles for deliverance from dictatorship. Her greatness lies in her passing on  power and, thereafter, working as citizen Cory until her passing on.

            

Yet, to paraphrase Gorbachev, we have a long way to go in living up to our individual and collective commitment to keep alive Tita Cory’s legacy, and that of her husband Ninoy, whose martyrdom we again remember to help us cope with our losing her.

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We find solace in the eulogies and attendance of newsmakers during the wake. Yet I feel the words of one of lower rank and stature, Insp.Melchor Mamaril, President Cory’s long-time security aide, somehow summed up our common and collective grief as a nation.

            

“She treated us not as mere employees but like a mother tending to a son after a hard day’s work,” Mamaril said. “I feel a sense of wonder and at the same time, I realized that her treatment raised my dignity as a person. She gave us self-respect, self-worth and self-confidence.”

            

As did Clifton Pollard, the 42-year old grave digger, express the world’s grief when he prepared President John F. Kennedy’s resting place at Arlington National Cemetery in November, 1963.

            

“He was a good man,” Pollard said of the assassinated President. “Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up. You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this,” he told Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin.

            

As it was an honor beyond their dreams for the nameless in Cory’s wake and funeral: I refer to those who prepared her grave beside her husband, the honor guards who stood steadfast for hours at the vigil and on the funeral truck, the drivers of the cortege, the aides who opened and held umbrellas, brewed and served coffee, prepared food, or did other manual, menial tasks to be also of comfort.

It was honor enough for them to have waited and stood with the crowds of thousands for a fleeting glimpse of the wake and the funeral. It was honor for them to have murmured a word of praise or prayer, tied a yellow ribbon, searched for and held an old  photograph, or to have  recalled where one was in 1983 or 1986. Or remembered being not yet born by then and still  know why their   nation mourns.

           

From the papers, I finally got the names of SPO4 Crispin Corpuz and SPO3 MacarioPangilinan who had the honor of having served with Insp. Mamaril. I still feel the need to know who shined the pairs of black shoes and ironed the clothes of Cory’s children and grandchildren in time for the funeral.

           

Breslin’s piece capturing Pollard’s thoughts and feelings has become a mini-classic, a shining standard for effective and powerful narrative journalism. (e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.)