quote to tickle thought: O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! (Edna St. Vincent Millay, God’s World)
news flashes in the US: House votes to clamp limits on Wall Street bonuses; trader’s $100 million payday poses quandary for regulators; on reality TV, tired, tipsy and pushed to brink; aid to unemployed running out; Gates racial drama ensnares minor characters
in perspective: A recent trip to Hungary revealed the stark impact of the global economic recession since a mere two years before. Family vineyards were shuttered and tourist shopping areas closed early. Restaurants were virtually deserted.
By contrast, Shiphole airport in Amsterdam was abustle with Asians, Africans, Arabs and generic people describable by shades of skin color and hair texture, all speaking languages ranging from common English to esoteric Slavic. The overall image conveyed a world on the move, with those moving seeming at ease with change, even if Sudanese had to learn Russian to keep up with the pace.
Back in America, meanwhile, a tempest in a teapot boiled over into an incident of potential international importance when a Black Harvard professor and a white police chief butted heads and the western industrialized world’s first non-white leader made an impolitic comment. His favorable ratings plummeted by nearly 10 percent after that one comment, even as he juggled the mandate that had won him the 2008 US election, that of managing a global economic crisis caused in large part by eight years of unbridled deregulation of financial institutions until America’s middle class effected a rescue to prevent economic wipe-out even as that same middle class lost jobs and assigned blame to illegal aliens and outsourcing of American jobs to foreigners.
The local is very much global in the 2009 Obama era. Likewise, the global is local. America broke human glass ceilings worldwide in the areas of gender and race with its 2008 election, in part to correct its course in a world no longer subject to the white male dominant order that had led to the unprecented worldwide economic crisis.
Undoubtedly blessed by virtue of geographical advantage and constitutional foundation, America’s legacy of slavery from its own colonial days under British rule has served as an impetus for the country to become a beacon of democracy and openness for the world.
In the 2009 Obama era, that world needs America to grow up and adventure beyond its comfort zone. It calls on America to admit it is bored with the small-town mentality of self-absorption that trumpets pumped up celebrities and fake reality shows to stimulate itself.
America needs involvement with the world’s 200 other countries in a role beyond aggressor, military force or dominator. By definition of its constitution, America’s destiny is to be a true leader concerned with overall welfare in fostering growth and controlling the destructive.
Toward that end, America’s trademark in the world is to think and act big. Room for the individual gratification of greed is one result. The development of mechanisms to control such impulses is another.
Petty domestic squabbles about caring for its own people are beneath America’s dignity. America has the wherewithall to take care of its own.
The generosity to do so will stem from America’s courage in fulfilling its destiny by rising beyond the trivial and going bravely into the unknown. Those are the territories in which redress is found for present-day consequences of historical wrongs.
