I have conditioned myself never to look at the comments section on youtube, just watch the videos. It just frustrates, irritates and ends up making me fear for humanity. But thankfully, Tuesday night restored some hope in one section of humanity of this very varied world we live in, pax americana.
 
I do not rest all my hopes in Obama and delude myself to think he will achieve everything that’s been laid out. He is a mere mortal and he will, no doubt, make mistakes, just as he’s admitted he is bound to do (think FISA, Patriot Act etc). Perhaps it’s the asian in me who views politicians as no knights in shining amour who somehow can affect blanket change without the people of the country working alongside and holding those leaders accountable. What is most remarkable about last night and truly makes me cry is that the American people actually put the “people” back in “We the people”. But we have to remain that instrument of change and leave a legacy of inspiration, hope and change to our young children. It is not to affect change in someone else but within ourselves. Nothing changes without the realisation that it is and always has been in our hands.
 
I saw Barack Obama in person at the Key Arena in February when I wasn’t too sure about who I could support. He spoke sincerely and authentically. I found myself close to tears when he said with such clarity: “When we speak to world leaders we do not agree with, face to face, from a position of truth, what do we have to fear?” I had almost given up hope that I’d hear an American leader say intelligent things. There were a number of those moments to come…(“we may not always agree, but I promise you I will always tell you the truth”). And of course, his emphasis on unity and not division.
 
Then there was that one moment when it was clear he would be the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party and got on stage to speak to his supporters. He mentioned Hillary’s name; someone booed and said something not-so-nice. He turned towards the direction of that voice, pointed his finger to the person, and said, “You will NOT speak of her that way!” Gasp!! A principled man. One who ran a principled, well-run and effective campaign which business schools are studying! 
 
We are living in trying times and I for one, am glad we now have a President who can actually lead the people. If he runs the administration like he ran his campaign – disciplined, well-managed – I breathe a sigh of relief.
 
My prayer today and everyday to come, is that this man that the world embraces, will hold on to those principles and lead with clarity of thought, harnessing wisdom and girding himself with truth and justice.  

Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  We can do it.

Peace.

For those people whose past and present has been impacted by the foreign policy of the United States of America, following the politics of this powerful country is nothing new. Perhaps one can even say many outside America know more about these policies than the average American who is not affected by it except when a costly war is waged.

Coming from a country where American foreign policy has meant I could not grow up being spoiled by my grandparents, or knowing my family and relatives, who were embroiled in a 30 years struggle for independence, you can imagine politics has never been far away from my table or from that of the Eritrean people. Either democrats or republicans, US policy towards the Eritrean people has been more or less unconstructive to say the least. But for the first time this year, I read about Eritreans organizing, aside for Eritrean causes, and the birth of ‘Eritreans For Obama’. And when my friends here, apolitical and a with huge apathy to politics, started watching Obama on CNN and the campaign trail with devotion, I knew something was in the making. The more I followed the elections, the more I was wondering about the unique factor and many questions came up.

Why is such unprecedented support for OBAMA? I asked myself.

Is it because he is black? BUT, actually is he black? or African American, or European American? The uniqueness of Barack Obama has been mentioned so often as the first African American Black president.

Why, in America, the self-proclaimed vanguard of democracies and the land of the free, is it still a unique milestone that an American with a Kenyan father runs for presidency? Isn’t equality of human beings the basis for democracy?

And why is he being identified by the color of his father and not necessarily his mother’s? Patriarchal tendencies? What if he identifies more with the whiteness of his mom? After all, he spent more time with the white part of his family than his African side.

And, what if he didn’t have chocolate skin color, but looked more like the cream white of his mother? Would he still be an African American or something else?

And finally, what if he does not identify with any of the above? Color blind, so to say. What if Barak identifies with his experiences rather than his skin color? I never knew I had a skin color identifying me as different and black until I visited America at the age of 13. And yet I was raised in Africa.

I never understood the prefixes either. Why can’t there be just plain Americans? Not (Chinese, Japanese, African, Mexican etc) Americans? Who are the Americans without prefixes then? In a country where patriotism runs in the blood, these prefixes are baffling.

Here in the Netherlands, putting prefixes to identify 2nd and 3rd and probably 4th generation of children born to labor migrants who came in the 50s and 60s has had a damaging impact. These kids know no other country than which they are born into, but partly they are raised with a culture that is often very different from the dominant one. And so these young people struggle to identify themselves. Society demands they assimilate while at the same time these prefixes disenfranchise them, depicting them as different because of the ethnicity of their parents and grandparents. Decades later, they are still Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch, Indonesian-Dutch etc, except maybe if they become an outstanding athlete, then they quickly befit a ‘Dutch athlete with a Kenyan origin’ such as Lornah Kiplagat, world champion half –marathon. Her Dutch passport is younger than many of these kids.

Putting people in a box will not move us forward, be it a box we jump into ourselves. I hope Barak Obama, instead of being an African American president becomes the change president that resonates not only to Americans, but also to places like the Netherlands and beyond. He has 85% of the votes here, so he has already won by double-digit landslide!

Madeline Albright, in a TV show during her visit here to promote her book and Hillary Clinton, said; essentially foreign policy means ‘making other countries do what you want them to do’. While foreign policy has been a top issue during the campaign, discussion about the implications of foreign policy has not gone beyond US’s stances towards Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I have not seen or read hardly any public discussion by the candidates or the US media on what actually this foreign policy means on the ground. For instance, close to where Obama’s ‘blackness’ comes from, in Somalia, one of the worse humanitarian crisis is taking place and US’s foreign policy in Somalia has made things worse and is not constructive. In the name of foreign policy, the US has propped up those who abuse their power, or human rights. How does such double standard hold up against democratic values? Even Barack Obama in his interview with the CNN, said ‘ We will eliminate him (Osama Bin Laden), kill him and apply death penalty if necessary (appropriate) ‘. What about bringing him to justice? Isn’ t that what democracy stands for, even if it is our worse enemy? What of, all the Christian morals that have been flying around this election, how does revenge and destroy our enemy fit in, as opposed to turn the other cheek?

Who answers for the suffering and loss of lives that has been caused as the result of Iraq’s invasion or in the name of foreign policy elsewhere?

The hard reality (not just in the US) is that of double standards, incomplete justice, human rights and democratic processes. Discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, and personal choice still exists. Self-interest and national security will often out weight fairness and equality. Nor is producing a lot of white noise about candidates and campaigns a reflection of true democratic process when citizens are genuinely afraid their votes will be stolen or the richest country in the world can’t organize sufficient voting capacity that people have to wait in line for 5 hour before voting.

Despite all of this and for all its flaws, the OBAMA promise gives a ray of hope and has to a large extent diminished apathy of US voters, and giving people the belief they have a say in their future. Those of us abroad hope the message of inclusion and healing will touch and reverberates through US foreign policy as well.

YES WE CAN – live in peace, share the benefits and challenges of this earth, if we believe in the possibility of shared future where all peoples will be better off. After all, who would not want to live the ‘American Dream’?

http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2008/11/04/color-blind-barak-obamas-uniqueness-versus-the-black-spot-of-race/

I also continue to feel that somehow my concept and belief of Christianity is vastly different than the one that’s “out there”. The one that gets air time on tv, in print and in the blogosphere. The faith of Sarah Palin and the Jesus she seems to believe in is not the one I grew up believing or find in the scriptures today as an adult. How is it that being divisive and judgmental is being the voice of faith? It was reported by the Associated Press yesterday that Palin claimed she felt God was mocked in the campaign process. In an interview to be shown on the Christian Broadcast Network, Palin says:

“I think the saddest part of that is that faith, not just my faith, faith and God in general has been mocked through this campaign, and that breaks my heart and that is unfair for others who share a faith in God and chose to worship our Lord in whatever private manner that they deem fit and my faith has always been pretty personal. I haven’t really worn it on my sleeve. I haven’t been out there preaching it. I’ve always been of the mind that you walk the walk. You just don’t have to be talking the talk about your beliefs, so just wanting maybe my life to be able to reflect my faith.”

I suppose you can almost guess where I’m going with this. I’ll leave the “God is mocked” part till later, hurrrmph! First, she claims it’s “unfair” to others who share a faith in God: how so? Is she claiming that as long as you are an Evangelical christian, you have the right to worship your Lord in ‘whatever private manner’ you ‘deem fit’? What about the millions of others who do worship God in manners different from yours? What is fair to them? Does she even understand religious history where Christians, just as Jews, share many common scriptural beliefs as the Muslims? That all three regard Abraham as the father of their faiths? That we all are the children of Abraham.

Here’s something Mrs. Palin needs to realise. The very God she claimed to be mocked, is indeed mocked and smeared every time she points her finger and accuses another of evil. Every time she judges another as a pal of terrorists, she hammers that nail to the cross one more time. Every time she proclaims one area of this nation as more American than another, she makes that cross heavier. Each one of us is created in the image of the divine and thus, any act of violence, in thought, word or deed against another is an act against the Divine.

Walk the walk?! Puh-leaze. The day when you fully realise, Mrs. Palin, that the Christ whose name you claim to bear, walked through Judea and Palestine as He began His ministry, only after he announced the Scripture of Isaiah 61 was fulfilled in the presence of the members of the synagogue. What exactly was fulfilled?

“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” (KJV)

So, Mrs. Palin, when I see you and the party whose nominee you are, regardless of how much you want not to talk about it (say it ain’t so, Sarah!), step up and free those held captive by your policies; when I see you and your party mend the brokenhearts of the victims of Katrina; when you set the captives held illegally in Guantanamo free; when you comfort the families who mourn their lost loved ones in the war you wage in Iraq and Afghanistan; when you and your presidential candidate walk the talk of restoring dignity to the hundreds of veterans of these two wars living under bridges and in cardboard boxes, then, only then, Mrs. Palin, will you honour Him whose name you call upon. Remember, He did not say calling Him Lord will get you into heaven. He said when you do feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty and come to the need of those in prison will you see the kingdom of God. When you do to the least of these, you do unto Him (Matt 25:34-46).

He is the One who challenged the crowd ready to stone the adultress to death, to cast the first stone he who had no sin. He then exhorted the woman to go and sin no more. The Jesus of the scriptures did not choose to judge her or condemn her. He did not vilify Matthew a tax collector but instead invited him to join him as one of his own disciples. He reached out to Zacharias, another tax-collector (and thus, much hated by his community!) and accepted the man’s invitation to dinner at his house, much to the self-righteous indignation of his followers. That, Mrs. Palin, is our example of inclusion. Jesus did not alienate, He embraced people of all walks and beliefs. How will ‘they’ know we are His disciples, Mrs. Palin? “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34) 

Imago Dei. You and I, he and she, we and them. All in HIS image. All colours, all creeds. When you divide and alienate us, you weaken the strength of this great nation and dim the beacon that is America. When you draw us together, we stand strong and able to face whatever peril may come our way. In our diversity is our strength. We are many, but we are one American nation.  

E Pluribus unum.