Be Kind, Unwind

“No generation can escape history.” — George H.W. Bush

In the wake of George H.W. Bush’s death over the weekend, I found myself leaning into the reflective articles and podcasts that filled my feed. While it might have been compounded by my nostalgic memories for HW, my 1989 Ford pickup truck that I was forced to sell a few years back, I believe it was something deeper.

I put on W the other night, Oliver Stone’s portrait of HW’s son George W. Bush that centres around his turbulent life and muddied legacy. Stone paints a curious relationship between father and son, of W yearning and failing to get out from under his celebrated father’s shadow. It’s a real tongue in cheek irony that Bush junior was re-elected for igniting a never-ending war while HW was punished for ending one.

After coming across a fascinating little expose on "The Irreducible Niceness of George H. W. Bush”, I came to understand the motivations behind the man. HW was someone who genuinely wanted to bring good to the world through leading by example, who saw the political machine as something that needed to be treated with caution and respect. 

"Bush was the last president who believed that people who had knowledge and experience should make decisions based on that and not on their ideological views," Suri says. "It was a businessman's approach to making decisions about leadership. You appoint and promote the person who's most qualified over the person you might agree with more.”

The more I educate myself to the fundamentals of politics, the more I realize its very essence betrays the virtues of humanity. The political machine rewards individuals for cheating and deceiving people, promising one thing and doing another.

Don’t buy into the fake news hysteria and political rhetoric that only serves to exacerbate the extremities of social malaise in the age of the Internet. Be someone that lives up to their laurels.

Someone who truly makes a difference.