Marlene Wagman-Geller

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”   
– William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Living under the reign of terror results in the milk of human kindness or acts of brutality. During the dark days of the Holocaust, some individuals sheltered their Jewish neighbors; others turned a blind eye to the hapless. History has enshrined the names of the Righteous of the era when mankind buried its humanity.  Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden saved the Jews of Hungary; Irene Sendler of Poland rescued children from the Warsaw Ghetto, Miep Gies of Holland helped the families hiding in the Secret Annex.  An unsung hero was a girl who, enmeshed in a spider’s web, proved that in an era where the norm was random acts of madness, there could still exist random acts of kindness.  

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” is a song James Brown recorded in a New York studio in 1966, and, given the era in which he wrote, his words rang true. A map of Manhattan illustrates that men shaped the city and left behind their names as their calling cards. 

In 1953, Edmund Hillary stood where heaven meets earth, a feat that made him the first man to scale Mt. Everest. Fifty-four years later, a woman who shared his surname also achieved a historical first, all the more remarkable as she did so in her seventh decade.

        Chiapas was indistinguishable from any other hard-scrabble Mexican town: emaciated dogs wandered dirt roads, women peddled home-spun wares, men with leathery faces sat under the shade of a tree, hope for the future long absent. The sun was a remorseless eye that withered crops, flowers, dreams. 

~Posted in tribute to Sally Ride Day, May 26^th

        The men who heeded the siren call of the sky are legendary: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong, Aldrin. Then came Sally Ride, who blazed a cosmic trail when she became the first woman astronaut and shattered the glass dome of the galaxy.