the passing of progressive men

I forgot last week to mention: I learned from reading the newspaper on Sunday, February 27th, that Peter Benenson and Robert Kearns had died.

Benenson, 83, was the man who founded Amnesty International back in 1961 after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in Portugal. Their crime was toasting liberty in a public cafe.

Kearns, 77, was the man who invented intermittent windshield wipers. He got the patents for his invention in 1967. Auto manufacturers started using the wipers without a licensing agreement, and in settling cases against Ford and Chrysler he won judgments of more than twenty million dollars, with interest.

That these two pioneers in their disparate fields died on the same day, I think, implies some grand design. Perhaps, in time, we will come to understand its importance.