Winston Churchill had a great sound bite for a world he wouldn't recognize today. In a poignant moment, he said success was the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
America was failing hugely at the bottom line of economics when it chose to make history instead of continuing on a downward spiral. In the 2008 election, the prudent America known for no-nonsense practicality chose the only rational way forward. It elected to stop the hemorrhage of its resources from the middle class to the upper, where the nutrients after eight years of an outmoded and unenlightened administration only bred a nexus of tumors in the world.
The 2008 US election electrified the world in one of the gloomiest moments to which the US itself had led the way. World society was still choking after the election, but the door had been thrown open. Fresh approaches to old world solutions were at hand.
The depth of the global economic crisis was the barometer of the complex, new and interconnected quantum of the modern world that few understand. The phenomenon, however, was an outgrowth of history, just as the communication superhighway began with earlier breakthroughs in radio and television.
The enthusiastic global response to the outcome of the 2008 US election shows that the world sees America as capable of curing the economic woes it had created. They believe in the new leader's fresh approach, which is to simply put people first while recognizing institutional and historical constraints.
Raised unconventionally and yet rooted in American Ivy League tradition, America's president-elect is the essence of the American spirit. Like America, the world sees him as "able to leap over tall buildings" simply because he has dealt a death blow to racism.
America, the former British colony that began as a product of European expansionism, has redeemed its old-world forebears. In the process, America has proven itself as worthy of being world leader.
In the 600-odd years between the discovery of America and the 2008 US election, little of the world was untouched by European aggression and ambition. The Incas were wiped out by Spain, India wore the British yoke just like the Middle East, Africa was trampled by competing European interests and the world took part in two global-level wars continued by a cold war one that entangled and set the world's countries and regions against each other.
The 2008 US election realigned that history by making the "racial issue" a historic artifact. That accomplishment opened the way for America to expand into a global consciousness. The world for America could now become a unified society joined together in an economic crisis while fighting pockets of international terrorism intent on disrupting the global social and economic order that was concertedly aimed at development and growth as an integral unit.
The significance of the 2008 US election had yet to sink in to both America and the world during the transition between administrations. The long three-month period in 2008, however, served a dual purpose.
As the sitting US president and the president-elect performed respective functions in the transition, America and the world were given the opportunity to compare and contrast. They were also afforded the time to acclimate to the enormous change taking place in the world.
Revolutionary overturns needing time to assimilate, non-whites during the transition no doubt adjusted to vindicated relief. The formerly elite whites, during the same time, undoubtedly juggled mixed responses to the perceptual adjustments about race they needed to fast-track.
In both cases during the 2008 transition, image seemed more effective than logic. As America reeled under the bleak economic outlook for the coming years, a clumsy sitting white president responsible for the fiscal mess stood as a lingering obstruction to the new approaches a young non-white family would bring to the old-world ways not working anywhere in the world.
Hungarian-born American internationalist writer Helen Fogarassy has worked with the United Nations for nearly 20 years. She is the author of a suspense novel, The Midas Maze, about murderous hijinks in UN/US relations. She is also the author of The Light of a Destiny Dark, a novel about the Euro-American cultural gap through Hungarian eyes, and a nonfiction eyewitness tribute to the UN's work, Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia. All are available on the major web bookstore sites. Email her at helfog@aol.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Helen_Fogarassy
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar