Learning positive thinking from the wife of the American arrested with the Congolese 20. SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2013 v7n2 p1224
When is staying where you are positive thinking and when is it denial?
I remember a horrible story from 9/11, when the world trade towers were on fire, and those who were able to, managed to get out to safety. One reported seeing a young man who was so scared he could not move, could not save himself, so he went down with the towers. Positive thinking would have made him get up, made him run, made him give living a chance.
Positive
thinking means you have assessed the very worst thing that can happen,
and decide you can live with that, and go ahead. Jeanine Kazongo, the wife of the American arrested with the Congolese 20, has to be the most successful positive thinker I
know.
Jeanine knows she and her children can be foreclosed out of her house at any time, but she also knows that hanging on as long as possible is in the best interests of her children.
She know that her children have only one parent, and her primary function is to keep them safe. She is doing this, and gradually taking on more work so that she can support them.
She believes that President Zuma and the South African government are fundamentally good, but have been lied to by rogue police, and that her husband will be released from Pretoria Central Prison any day now, and that when he is, he will slip back into her family, welcomed, honored, and that the family will be intact, as it is now.
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My positive thinking is not as strong as Jeanine's.
After
our
annual Christmas breakfast, I gave a message to Haddonfield Friends
Meeting, and broke down before I could complete it. I gave the message
that 19 men were driven to a killing filed, but were not shot in cold
blood by South African security police because the man they baited the
trap for, Etienne Kabila, was not with them.
I have been trying
to get public opinion to support their innocence and get the charges
dropped since March, and on the shortest day of the year, on the days of
the winter solstice, all looked bleak and all I could think of was how
the men are suffering in jail, the women and children are suffering in
South Africa and in Delaware.
The
day after the winter solstice, the days are indeed getting longer,
which my mother always told us, and suddenly Jeanine's positive thinking
is leading me to the light and giving me the strength to keep fighting,
keep smiling.
I
have been so blessed to know and love the Congolese 20 and their wives
and children. Extraordinary strong, decent, hard-working humans who have
been caught in webs of post-apartheid, post-colonial lies.
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