True leadership on the world stage is truly hard to find these days - to rework a memorable refrain from a favourite hit of my early twenties, leadership (as opposed to 'love') [of] 'the lasting kind'...
...but such leadership appears part of the (character) makeup of German Chancellor Angela Merkel...
...whose visit to a Polish death-camp, *Auschwitz itself, of recent days... and what she had to say there... says everything that needs to be said as to why she - **rather than the present Portuguese occupant, however otherwise worthy he may well be (or not) - ought to be the person presently residing over the United Nations...
Yes, were our present-day world really looking for calibre in its so-called leaders, it needn't look any further than Ms Merkel, such an intangible 'quality' being epitomized by her decision to visit Auschwitz 'at such a time as this', and thus register her ****fellow-feeling with and ****genuine sorrow for those who suffered so awfully and tragically at the hands of her very own nation only 70-odd years ago.
*Bamboozled presently as to the correct spelling...
**Installed (as in voted in) after a particularly hard-fought contest featuring our own former prime minister, Helen Clark, incidentally...and moreover one in which Clark was herself apparently 'pipped at the post' due to the 'rotational' chairmanship of the UN, the idea being that the one area (other than Aotearoa-New Zealand's own ***Oceania) that hadn't as yet had a United Nations Secretary-General was the former Eastern Bloc. So who better to have been chosen - even if 'in absentia' and drafted as it were into the position if need be - than the German Chancellor, coming as she did from the former Eastern Germany?
***A term rarely employed except by the UN to denote one of ten global regions...although said term does also feature in that 20th-century classic of classics, George Orwell's epoch-defining 1984.
****Please accept my heartfelt assertion here, that, for the time being, those two 'phrases' - i.e. 'fellow-feeling' and 'genuine sorrow' - are the only ones that come readily to me, though in both instances being an infinite understatement of the sheer awfulness of *****the Holocaust and my own long-held emotions surrounding it and its victims...
*****Incidentally, for all those with the stomach to look into it, Michael Drosnin's (I believe) two books, The Bible Code and The Bible Code 2, provide some incredible additional info thereupon.
...but such leadership appears part of the (character) makeup of German Chancellor Angela Merkel...
...whose visit to a Polish death-camp, *Auschwitz itself, of recent days... and what she had to say there... says everything that needs to be said as to why she - **rather than the present Portuguese occupant, however otherwise worthy he may well be (or not) - ought to be the person presently residing over the United Nations...
Yes, were our present-day world really looking for calibre in its so-called leaders, it needn't look any further than Ms Merkel, such an intangible 'quality' being epitomized by her decision to visit Auschwitz 'at such a time as this', and thus register her ****fellow-feeling with and ****genuine sorrow for those who suffered so awfully and tragically at the hands of her very own nation only 70-odd years ago.
*Bamboozled presently as to the correct spelling...
**Installed (as in voted in) after a particularly hard-fought contest featuring our own former prime minister, Helen Clark, incidentally...and moreover one in which Clark was herself apparently 'pipped at the post' due to the 'rotational' chairmanship of the UN, the idea being that the one area (other than Aotearoa-New Zealand's own ***Oceania) that hadn't as yet had a United Nations Secretary-General was the former Eastern Bloc. So who better to have been chosen - even if 'in absentia' and drafted as it were into the position if need be - than the German Chancellor, coming as she did from the former Eastern Germany?
***A term rarely employed except by the UN to denote one of ten global regions...although said term does also feature in that 20th-century classic of classics, George Orwell's epoch-defining 1984.
****Please accept my heartfelt assertion here, that, for the time being, those two 'phrases' - i.e. 'fellow-feeling' and 'genuine sorrow' - are the only ones that come readily to me, though in both instances being an infinite understatement of the sheer awfulness of *****the Holocaust and my own long-held emotions surrounding it and its victims...
*****Incidentally, for all those with the stomach to look into it, Michael Drosnin's (I believe) two books, The Bible Code and The Bible Code 2, provide some incredible additional info thereupon.
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