It requires little more than being of a certain generation, and just a touch of compassion and racial sensitivity, to remain in awe all these years after the magnificent day in 1990 when Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela walked out of an apartheid-era prison and into a new and hopeful day for South Africa and the world watching it.
So went a climatic act in a dizzying three decades of Western history. Civil rights had come, at last and for real, to this country. In Europe, one communist government after another was about to fall. And now this ugly, repressive, institutionalized form of racial cruelty was coming to a forceful but ultimately peaceful end in a land of riches that had been turned into a pariah state.
For that, the world needs to hail Mr. Mandela as it mourns him upon his death at the age of 95. He stands as one of the great crusaders of the 20th century, with the purpose and perseverance of Mahatma Gandhi and the dignity if not necessarily the outward passion and captivating eloquence of Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have waited too long for our freedom," Mr. Mandela said upon his release after more than 27 years in political captivity. "We can wait no longer."
In seemingly no time at all, apartheid was finally over, in a culmination of a struggle that required both guerrilla warfare in the cities and countryside of South Africa and unrelenting diplomatic pressure in the more civilized arena. Apartheid was over, that is, and supplanted by an astonishing triumph of racial rapprochement. Vengeance simply wasn't part of the agenda for the South Africa that Mr. Mandela was about to lead. There, he had the most unlikely of all allies — F.W. de Klerk, the eminently practical Afrikaner who recognized the inevitability of history.
Together they shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
Here's Mr. Mandela, on that historic occasion:
"We stand here today as nothing more than a representative of the millions of our people who dared to rise up against a social operation whose very essence is war, violence, racism, oppression, repression and the impoverishment of an entire people."
It's useful to remember those words at the end of the life of a man who went from a political dissident so feared that incarceration was deemed necessary to a statesman revered at home and abroad.
It's for good reason that the prison cell where Mr. Mandela so ironically grew in power and influence is destined to be a sacred place for the ages. That's where, as President Barack Obama wrote by way of introduction to Mr. Mandela's 2010 book of letters, "even when little sunlight shined into that Robben Island cell, he could see a better future — one worthy of sacrifice."
There's not a country anywhere where such vision and perseverance won't help bring about better days.
Jim McGrath was chief editorial writer for the Times Union until his death Sept. 4. He wrote this as an editorial when Nelson Mandela was hospitalized in grave condition earlier this year.