Thatcher

I wanted to title my post this morning with a reference to Baroness Thatcher's having noticed the movie posters of the 2001 blockbuster "The mummy returns", on her way to address a Tory rally in Plymouth, UK, and she wondered indeed whether they weren't simply referring to her. Unfortunately, as I was searching the exact data of the incident, I fell into the obituary by the Telegraph and "too late for that!" I thought. Many others are equally smart and much faster than I will ever be...

Anyways, I have been quite fortunate in my life to have seen the extraordinary woman on one occasion, only a couple meters away from where I stood, when we invited her back in 1998 to a Sterling Software User Conference in Dallas, TX, as a non-technical keynote speaker (we used to invite personalities of the sort, and customers really loved it; on one occasion we had a Lovell/Kranz double act about Apollo 13). It was after Thatcher's keynote, when she was escorted to a little tour around the conference stands. I remember she was extremely upbeat that day, and she didn't mind signing autographs. One of our female colleagues, very proud indeed as Thatcher came from Venus too, emerged as one of those with an autograph of hers on the back of a Sterling business card. A hilarious quote I remember of Thatcher's on that day, during her keynote, was about the then President of China. She referred to a meeting she had with him when she was PM, many years earlier, and told us she was reasonably impressed by his skills. "I could have used him in my cabinet", she stated, at the audience's ultimate amusement. Yep, Maggie was simply the best! She'll probably get the house in order up there in heavens where she arrived earlier this week...

My prime motivation for posting this today is not that I feel particularly qualified to say anything about this giant of leadership in world politics - who am I after all? - but about the lack of respect by younger people for her personage. I saw this picture at BBC this morning and was sickened by its view. Slogans like 'the bitch is dead' written on T-shirts, and a youth 'drinking' bubbly from a bottle to celebrate her passing. I wonder whether he didn't pick it up empty from a nearby litter and was just posing to show off (his utter thickness). Now tell me, how useless, brain-dead and good for nothing does one need to be to do something like that? Is this the kind of youth that is supposed to rule the world and make it a better place for us all to live in? Dream on. Thankfully, most sane people around, I'd like to believe, would think the way I do about those demonstrating jerks. Centuries after they do pass and disappear into nothingness themselves, the History will still remember and quote Baroness Thatcher for her contributions to the UK and the World, whereas, at the same time, the BBC picture with the drinking youth, most likely unborn during Thatcher's reign as a PM, will have vanished into oblivion too...