I have commented a fair amount about the sanitization of Mandela’s life and legacy and I want to make an important clarification, prompted by a someone’s Facebook comment. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate and value Mandela’s messages of reconciliation. I do in ways that I cannot even begin to describe. But it is important that we remember that he did 27 years in prison for armed resistance and for being a communist, not for saying we should all love one another. To focus on his messages of reconciliation *only* is to erase three plus decades of the man’s life and to remove any context, really strip all the power, from his message. Mandela was a revolutionary, a man who was willing to go to prison, to die, but also to pick up arms to fight for his people, and a man who continued to advocate for the freedoms of all (and very specifically Palestinians, a little detail that I don’t think will make it on CNN) till the end. If we are to honor the man, let us honor all of him. If we are to learn from him, let us learn from all that he has done. To reduce him to a quote appropriate for a first grade public school classroom and turn him into someone who will be “praised” by the same people who classified him as a terrorist is to rob him of everything that he stood for. And it is to rob us of an amazing example of what a person can be and do.