AN IRON LADY
(…clad in the steel of principled resolve)

Lady Margaret Thatcher is gone.

For those of us who were her contemporaries her demise only brings us to the realization that our stream of history…inevitably keeps flowing onwards.

Others will no doubt write more elegantly about her many accomplishments, and how she was a major force in bringing about the end of the Cold War. As for us, since we were just field grunts in that war, we could only wonder at who the hell was this English babe who seemed to be the power-drive for our side of it.

Fortunately for us, President Reagan had the smarts to latch on to her to form a leadership partnership which ultimately brought a Cold War that had dragged on for decades to a halt, and causing the Soviets to disappear from the scene. In that sense is was a partnership equal to that of Churchill and Roosevelt during WWII.

At the same time, she was also shaking up her own British folk, by doing a grand imitation of a kick-ass DI trying to shape up a bunch or recalcitrant recruits… using steel-toed boots every step of the way to reach that result. Luckily for England she more or less succeeded. Of course, in the process, she rattled a lot of its cages, both among the Tory and Labor establishments, as she wielded her political battle-axe strokes to try and dismantle both its rigid class structures, and, on an otherwise moribund and socialized economic matrix. There are still folks there, today, who have never forgiven her for doing that. Mainly because, besides messing up their little power games that were otherwise sinking the country, she out –foxed them all…and did it…her way.

Well, she may not have been loved by many, and even hated by some, but all, eventually had to yield her some grudging respect, not just because she was that – Iron Lady – but because she was clad in the steel of…principled resolve.

CENTURION