The Importance Of Being Obama

xblues

具体看这里
http://www.samesame.com.au/featu ... -Of-Being-Obama.htm

我喜欢美国，我想做美国人是有原因的。因为They care!

http://www.youtube.com/v/MYHm0RyCyfU

http://www.youtube.com/v/CsnNyKQoFUk

http://www.youtube.com/v/yUEB6wYucDs

Then I picked up the Sydney Morning Herald and on the front page a short item “Gay backlash for Obama.” The item carried a story about how his claims of support had no timeline for change and therefore he couldn’t be trusted. I thought, “Did these people witness the same speech?” Did they not see him announce that the Anti-Hate Bill had been signed into law and that it would be named after Matthew Shepard, the young man murdered in a gay hate crime in Wyoming in 1998?

Did they miss that there, also, in the audience was Matthew’s mother and father, who have fought such an extraordinary battle to see hate fuelled violence against other humans stopped? The Herald, rather than report on the quantum leap for LGBT people, picked up on the negative responses to Obama’s commitment and ran only with that. Precisely at the time that the Seymour Centre was running a special 10th anniversary reading of The Laramie Project. No mention anywhere.

What is more dispiriting is that some individuals in our community saw this as a time to launch a tirade at Obama. I understand the need to challenge him. Hell, even Obama said, “You need to keep up the pressure on your leaders, and that includes me”. What I don’t get is how they don’t see the courage Obama is demonstrating in being so bold.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton made what could have been the ultimate political faux pas of the Democratic Nomination process when she made a link between her decision to stay in the race with, not only her husband’s late securing of the democratic nomination in 1992, but in what has been described as macabre, Clinton’s reference to the tragic assassination of Robert F Kennedy on 5 June 1968, the inference being that Obama risked the same fate.

And while RFK’s own son dismissed the remark as innocent and did not take offense, symbolically Clinton slipped, some say irretrievably, and many regard it as the coup de grace of her campaign for the White House.

So has the spirit of RFK finally arrived with Barack Obama?

I would argue it has and we need to embrace his vision. He has done something no US President has done before him, and that makes him a true herald for change. His administration is the harbinger of things to come. We are ungracious if we as a community can believe he will make it happen in one term even, but he is chipping away at some very powerful resistance and this must be acknowledged.

In June 1968, Robert “Bobby” Francis Kennedy was the juggernaut democratic candidate who entered into the race late – in March – but by June, his campaign was rolling towards the White House. When Kennedy announced his campaign, Nixon – standing for the Republican Party – was said to have remarked, “Something bad is going to come of this.”

Kennedy had undergone a personal transformation since the death of his brother in November 1963. Overwhelmed with grief, he continued as Attorney-General under Lyndon Johnson but resigned 9 months later. Johnson and Kennedy’s relationship was strained with Johnson despising Kennedy’s background and writing him off as a spoilt kid with nothing original to contribute. He stood for the US Senate for the state of New York and was elected in November ’64.

What came to define his short campaign for President was his belief in another kind of world. The Vietnam War was now deeply unpopular and Kennedy, while initially supporting the War, gained credence by saying he was wrong and would bring the war to an end.

His now famous speech at the University of Kansas on 18 March, 1968 illustrates just what kind of leader Kennedy might have been, and of itself might provide sad clues as to the reason behind his untimely death:

“We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear out highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the Redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads. It includes the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

And if the GNP includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. The GNP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

The year after Kennedy died the Stonewall Riots took place ushering in a new battleground for social justice. It would appear that perhaps along with Kennedy’s assassination went the last hope America had of becoming something other than it has. The relentless drive for economic growth (Reaganomics) and the collapse of small communities in the quest for some capitalist nirvana has built an endless suburban desert of strip malls, giving birth to an epidemic of addictions and mental health issues.

Nixon was elected and with it came the energy crisis coinciding with America’s peak in oil production in 1970 and the corruption that would ultimately see him resign to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Like Obama today, Kennedy represented a profound shift from earlier leadership, including his older brother who, in all likelihood, would’ve disagreed with parts of his younger brother’s vision for a better world. Kennedy was a huge supporter of the Civil Rights movement and its slain leader, Martin Luther King, who was gunned down outside a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee two months previously on April 4, 1968. Kennedy jumped up and said:

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarisation—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.”

With Obama having beaten McCain for the Presidency, his tenure will be as much about how successfully he defines how Americans see themselves and their future role in Global politics as it is about Christian fundamentalism, race, same sex marriage, Wal-Marts and an endless unsustainable consumer mentality. It could well be that Kennedy’s legacy is to imbue an Obama Presidency with a sense of decency in a world where the greedy corruption of human spirit, foisted on the petard of global capitalism, is awakened and the measure of things worthwhile to living become the very thing that we trade in every day.

It might be idealistic, but then the practical, rational world of global finance has left us bereft of a connection to the key elements that make us human: our connection with each other, our relationship to the earth and the surrender to a force greater than ourselves. It is ludicrous to suggest that all will change now or in his first term, but in our hearts we must remain conscious of that which we should be heading towards. Now, more than ever.

Barack Obama is a true leader. His speech to drive change for the LGBT community is historic. He risks a huge amount politically, but he also makes himself a target of the same hate that killed Shepard. To me that says: “I stand with you to show the world that this is not how it should be.” Let us give him our support and, by all means challenge inaction, but remember that change begins with a bold determination to go where none have gone before.

Jack_Chow

I saw a man named Osama in USA last year and joked that if he is Obama's brother.