Korean people have been dreaming of, waiting for, and praying for a leader like Mandela.
We have a pretty good one now in the South all of us hope and pray will fulfill her potentials
in her remaining years and shows the path for the people and the country as a whole.

Why Mandela was unique.
by Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, Dec 10, 2013

The global outpouring of respect for Nelson Mandela suggests that we’re not just saying goodbye to the man at his death but that we’re losing a certain kind of leader, unique on the world stage today, and we are mourning that just as much. Mandela had an extraordinary amount of “moral authority.” Why? And how did he get it? Much of the answer can be deduced from one scene in one movie about Mandela that I’ve written about before: “Invictus.” Just to remind, it tells the story of Mandela’s one and only term as president of South Africa, when he enlists the country’s famed rugby team, the Springboks, on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and, through that, to start the healing of that apartheid-torn land. Before the games, though, the sports committee in the post-apartheid, newly black-led South Africa tells Mandela that it wants to change the name and colors of the almost all-white Springboks to something more reflective of black African identity. But Mandela refuses. He tells his black sports officials that an essential part of making whites feel at home in a black-led South Africa was not uprooting all their cherished symbols. “That is selfish thinking,” Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, says in the movie. “It does not serve the nation.” Then speaking of South Africa’s whites, Mandela adds, “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.” There are so many big leadership lessons in this short scene. The first is that one way leaders generate moral authority is by being willing to challenge their own base at times — and not just the other side. It is easy to lead by telling your own base what it wants to hear. It is easy to lead when you’re giving things away. It is easy to lead when things are going well. But what’s really difficult is getting your society to do something big and hard and together. And the only way to do that is by not only asking the other side’s base to do something hard — in South Africa’s case, asking whites to cede power to black majority rule — but to challenge your own base to do hard things, too: in South Africa’s case, asking blacks to avoid revenge after so many years of brutal, entrenched, white rule. Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises C.E.O.’s on governance and who is the author of the book “How,” argues that another source of Mandela’s moral authority derived from the fact that “he trusted his people with the truth” rather than just telling them what they wanted to hear. “Leaders who trust people with the truth, hard truths, are trusted back,” said Seidman. Leaders who don’t generate anxiety and uncertainty in their followers, who usually deep down know the truth and are not really relieved, at least for long, by having it ignored or disguised. Finally, said Seidman, “Mandela did big things by making himself small.” “Through his uncommon humility and his willingness to trust his people with the truth,” explained Seidman, “Mandela created a hopeful space where enough South Africans trusted each other enough so they could unite and do the hard work of transition together.” What is so inspiring about Mandela, explained Seidman, “is that he did not make the moment of South Africa’s transition about himself. It was not about his being in jail for 27 years. It was not about his need for retribution.” It was about seizing a really big moment to go from racism to pluralism without stopping for revenge. “Mandela did not make himself the hope,” added Seidman. “He saw his leadership challenge as inspiring hope in others, so they would do the hard work of reconciliation. It was in that sense that he accomplished big things by making himself smaller than the moment.” To put it another way, Mandela, and his partner, South African President F.W. de Klerk, got enough of their people to transcend their past rather than to wallow in it. So much of American politics today, noted Seidman, is about “shifting, not elevating, people.” So much of American politics today is about how I narrowcast to this poll-tested demographic in this ZIP code to get just enough voters to shift to my side to give me 50.1 percent — just enough to win office, but not to govern or do anything big and hard. Mandela’s leadership genius was his ability to enlist a critical mass of South Africans to elevate, to go to a new place, not just shift a few votes at the margin. It is precisely the absence of such leadership in so many countries today that has motivated millions of superempowered individuals in different countries in the last four years — from Iran to Egypt to Tunisia to Turkey to Ukraine — to flock to public squares. What is striking, though, is the fact that none of these “Tahrir Square movements” have built sustainable democratic alternatives yet. That is a big, hard project, and it can only be done together. And it turns out that generating that unity of purpose and focus still requires a leader, but the right kind of leader. “People are rejecting leaders who rule by the formal authority of their position and command by hierarchical power,” said Seidman, but “they are craving genuine leadership — leaders who lead by their moral authority to inspire, to elevate others and to enlist us in a shared journey.”

GINGRICH'S PRAISE OF MANDELA RIPS OPEN ISSUE OF RACE
By Cynthia Tucker
8 hours ago

Newt Gingrich has been right about very few things during a long political career of hypocrisy, duplicity, narcissism and devotion to the no-holds-barred tactics of bomb-throwing and hyper-partisanship. But ever alert to political trends, he was right about this much: He openly opposed South Africa's apartheid government back in the 1980s, and he tried to persuade Ronald Reagan to support the stiff sanctions that finally helped to topple the hateful regime.

Gingrich understood that the Republican Party would not be well served if it continued to be identified as a defender of South Africa's pariah government. When Reagan vetoed legislation that imposed harsh economic penalties against the Pretoria regime, Gingrich helped to lead an effort to override the veto and impose sanctions.

Still, Gingrich has been as guilty as any Republican of using the 21st-century version of the Southern strategy to appeal to the least progressive members of the GOP base. So he shouldn't be surprised that his recent praise of Nelson Mandela was met with harsh responses by so many of his fans on the right.

The Republican Party has a huge race problem -- one that once again broke into the open in the aftermath of the extraordinary South African's death. American conservatives still find it difficult to celebrate the life of a man who stood against white supremacy. While several Republican politicians were laudatory when reflecting on Mandela's life, other conservatives were ambivalent.

Bill O'Reilly claimed that Mandela was a "great man" but also insisted he was a "communist." (South Africa's economic record under his leadership gives the lie to that.) Similarly, Dick Cheney called Mandela a "great man," but stubbornly defended his opposition to the sanctions that eventually led to Mandela's release.

It's no surprise, then, that Gingrich sparked a firestorm when he released a statement citing Mandela as "one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime." His Facebook fans unleashed a torrent of hateful comments in response, from chastising Gingrich for supposedly airbrushing Mandela's past -- "Newt, I thought you of all people, a historian, would be true to who this guy really was" -- to those more open in their racial antagonism: "He hated America, Newt. Quit pandering to the blacks."

Gingrich, to his credit, responded with a frank post to conservatives, asking them to consider what they would have done had they been in Mandela's place. But it hardly quelled the uproar.

For far too long, Republicans have been comfortable playing to the worst instincts of their base, especially those steeped in racial antagonism and uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. It will take years of hard work in the GOP vineyards to rip away all the kudzu of animus and suspicion toward black and brown citizens.

Since Barry Goldwater ran a 1964 presidential campaign on a platform of states' rights, the Republican Party has honed a strategy of appealing to disaffected whites -- stoking their resentments, fueling their fears, marshaling their paranoia. Every GOP presidential candidate since Goldwater has used that strategy because it reliably delivers certain voters to the polls.

In more recent times, GOP leaders have struggled to try to find a way to broaden the party's appeal to a more diverse constituency while also continuing to win the hearts and minds of disaffected whites. But it's a fence that cannot be straddled. Too many Republican voters refuse to acknowledge the toll of their country's racist past. And too many fear a future wherein whites will no longer constitute a majority.

Gingrich knows that all too well because he pandered to those fears in his 2012 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. He labeled President Obama the "food stamp president," an appellation designed to conjure up images of indolent black voters dependent on government aid.

The appalling comments he drew after he praised Mandela were simply retributive justice. Like other GOP leaders, he has appealed to the worst instincts of many Republican voters when he needed to -- a strategy that will continue to haunt the party as it tries to plot a course to the future.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata) is a serious invasive plant in the United States. It has been spreading in the southern U.S. at the rate of 150,000 acres (61,000 ha) annually, "easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually."[1] Its introduction has produced devastating environmental consequences.[2] This has earned it the nickname, "The vine that ate the South