Citizens of the World

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Thursday, July 31, 2008 by Common Wonders
Citizens of the World
by Robert C. Koehler



What a surprising burst of hope I felt, looking at the photo in the newspaper the next day: Barack Obama stands before 200,000 Berliners and addresses them as a “fellow citizen of the world.”

It may be premature, but I’m announcing it anyway: We’ve repealed the Bush Doctrine. There’s no turning back.

Hope has the staying power of fireworks, of course. Oooh, ahhh, and it’s over. But, “This mesh of private vision and historical change is mysterious,” writes Deepak Chopra. Obama is a politician with mostly short-term calculations to make, including how to align himself with the economic interests of oil and war and project enough reckless militarism to claim a share of the fear vote.

But the surge of history his campaign summons contradicts all that. At last America and the world — and in some ways the election may mean more to those beyond our borders than to those complacently, smugly, fearfully within them — have a candidate who is awake, not dead, to the vision and passionate global desire for . . . peace. And by this term I do not mean the false, hellish “peace” wrested violently, and temporarily, by one part of the world from another.

I mean the peace we haven’t built yet, the peace that leaves no one out, the peace that begins with a calm heart and ends in the dissolution of international enmity. I mean the peace that dehumanizes no one, resists mass hypnosis and sees through every shallow, short-sighted “us vs. them” scenario ever whipped up in the name of fear-drenched triumphalism. In a throw-away world poisoned with hatred and stockpiled with WMD, I mean the peace we must create for our own survival. This is the peace that Obama can articulate with clarity and, by God (is it possible?), courage:

“People of the world — look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one. . . .

“The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. . . .

“This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.”

This is why 200,000 Berliners turned out to see Obama and why he draws enormous crowds wherever he goes — why “Obamamania” is a term at all, conjuring as it does the “Beatlemania” of 40-plus years ago that also, so it turns out, announced a shift in human consciousness. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/31/10720/