A Tide Of Hope

The truly mind-boggling event of the citizens of the United States of America voting in majority to elect as their 44th president, a hitherto little-known man of mixed heritage and in the process finally admitting to their grand conscience that it is not external facade that marks the quality of the person, but temperament, character, intelligence, still has an air of unreality about it. It is an event that many would never have been able to predict.

As unlikely to occur, for example, as the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the fall of the Berlin Wall, the accord between the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Surely not in our time. The simple truth appearing that the American Civil War sentiments and resentments still simmer. The stark divisions between peoples of colour. The denigration and mass contempt by a white majority for a black presence.

That colour demonstrates inferiority, and deserves no entitlements, that black Americans could be treated as less than human because they were in fact, just that. And that that attitude could extend itself over a period of centuries to surface and remain an obdurate reality in the 20th, the 21st Centuries, ensured that the great bastion of freedom incarnate that is the United States was scorned internationally for its vile hypocrisy.

Truly a conundrum, that a population, diverse in its origins, yet collectively embracing individualism, integrity, conscience and a desire for opportunities and freedoms extended to all, could yet embrace the unconscionable anti-human concept that some humans are more worthwhile, capable and entitled than others. The time was long past that such a cruel concept was swept into oblivion.

Well, that old saying that a rising tide lifts all boats is a wishful one. There are some boats that will remain recalcitrantly filled with a hatred so miserable their very weight will swamp them. For a nation given to optimism, though, in parlous social and political times, a desire for meaningful change that disowns the ugly past has lifted the country in a tidal wave of hope.

The power of wishful thinking really is a compelling one. And Barack Obama, the American president-elect, had the inborn capacity to elucidate that power, to engender in his hopeful listeners the certainty that they could, collectively, lift themselves to another living dimension, to arrive at a finer social contract illuminating the lives of them all.

Senator Obama, president-elect, delivered a compellingly powerful victory speech, complete with wide-ranging assurances. He thanked those who trusted and supported him, who worked unstintingly for change, struggled against pessimism, reached out for hope. Yes, he told them, you can. Just as loving parents assure their children that nothing should be beyond their reach for their future.

The man's massive self-assurance, his placid temperament, his cool and collected will, enthralled, mesmerized and placated his audience. He made allusions to the past history of the country, and spoke of what the country could and must yet attain to. This was an outstanding delivery by a man whose quiet passion for his country led him unerringly to enthuse others to accept his vision for the future.

Standing there at the blue podium in Chicago's Grant Park before a hundred-thousand people, he spoke of a gleaming future as a united, idealistic people, a beacon of freedom, courage and amity, pledging personally to represent all Americans, across party lines. His was a magisterial self-assurance as of one born to lead.

The future will most certainly demonstrate whether his messianic message and presence owes to the peculiarity of mass hysteria at a time of national stress, or is the manifestation of a singular presence whose careful ability to transform his country to fulfil its destiny becomes reality.