Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has died.  I often think that in comparison to the statesmen and politicians that ran the world when I was younger, todays "political elite" all throughout the world often behave like spoiled adolescents.  I suspect some of that is due to the unrelenting news and internet coverage these people receive now.  It's likely that some of these folks wouldn't have looked as stately if the 24/7 news cycle had been around a half century ago.  Certainly JFK would have been unlikely to have kept the adoring press image in today's world. It's also possible that I remember people differently in hindsight than they actually were.  Still folks like President's Reagan, Kennedy, Konrad Adenaur, Pope John Paul II and Lady, Thatcher were made of sterner stuff I think than today's breed.  

President Obama has grown in the five years he's been President, but I don't see him ever placed next to any of the persons in the list above.  Lest you think that's me picking just on him, no current Republican in office rises to the President's level in this regard.  Some of that is do to the circumstances of their time at the top.  People under the age of 30 have no idea what growing up during the Cold War was like.  The politicians that managed their way through it at least were raised during the cauldron that was World War II.   

Margaret Thatcher has died and she along with a whole list of Western Leaders {and some Soviet ones too-think Mikhail Gorbachev} mid-wifed the world for better or worse into it's modern form.  Under their watch the Cold War never went hot.  Instead it went cold, as in dead, when the whole rotten idea that was communism bankrupted itself on Ronald Reagan's long ash heap of history.  She was as tough as nails and like Reagan here in the US, brought Great Britain back from the brink of despair.  Her policies were often not popular while she was in office but she went out as perhaps the most beloved of Prime Ministers next to Winston Churchill.  

The bell tolls for what we here in the States refer to as the Greatest Generation.  Very few of the political class from that era remains,  President Bush and Queen Elizabeth are a few exceptions to this rule.  I may be wrong but at the end of the day, the body of work established by their predecessors in the  generation that inherited the political system from them will pale next to what they did.

Margaret Thatcher has died.  One of the last grown-ups has left the building.  Rest well Lady Thatcher and God Speed.

"Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction."-Margaret Thatcher.