YES, HOPE
(Dedicated to my great sister Andrea in Albany, N.Y.)
At the time of the near collapse of its predatory and kleptomaniac financial system that robs the poor to give to the rich, America reinvented itself through rediscovering the first lines of its Constitution: “We, the people,” and not “we, the money”. The joy was fierce in the faces of the crowd that faced Obama in Chicago on the evening of his election victory.
When Barak Hussein Obama made his momentous speech at the University of Cairo, he spoke in the manner an enlightened spiritual personality would speak, should such a rare being find himself or herself in the unlikely position of being the President of the United States of America. He managed to show what politicians would like to stage manage: honesty, conviction, vision. But it was not staged, it was genuine. And hence it worked, as shown shortly afterwards by the elections in Lebanon. Is it not encouraging?
Like in his epoch making speech on races delivered in Philadelphia, the President could pick the threads of peoples’ pains, anger and aspirations and knit it all into the tapestry of the moment, producing through the power of his words a pattern of possibilities, greater mutual understanding and emerging togetherness. Is it not encouraging?
The word, the vision, the union, this is the mark of the protection of the Master of the Sudarshana. I know someone, my Master, who is silent today but who prepared such convergences.
This capacity of imbibing the potential of the time in a transformational gesture or moment is not just the mark of a great orator. It is what makes the Hegelian hero. The President is bringing about the evolutionary potential of the time. After the debacle of successive republican Administration, Obama managed to reposition a largely discredited country back on the higher moral ground, the place where the Founding Fathers wanted this nation to be.
Today, the Nobel Prize for Peace went to him. Is it not encouraging that old Europe can l tell young America that, yes, we can still recognize the worth and value that is bred in your nation? That we, men and women of the West, can still recognize goodness when it shows up? Is it not refreshing us with the sense that there is great hope? Yes, hope.