Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama

The elections have come and gone and America is still here, standing tall with millions of people holding on to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and yearning hopefully and faithfully for a great and better America.

Barack Obama will join the ranks of Lincoln, Kennedy and other political leaders whose assumption of the highest office of the land surprised many voters of their day but history in its games of paradoxes and ironies declares a new challenge to Americans and humanity.

Since the founding of the Republic, four things have captured the intellect, emotion and spiritual yearnings of the founding fathers and those who came after them. They are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- and the inglorious institution of slavery, an ugly stain on the Republican face.

Up till the American Civil War and its successful conclusion in the 1860's, the dream about a new republic in a world of kings and princes remains the dream of millions and their political leaders and statesmen. The election of Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama among the most obvious cases will continue to occupy the attention of people looking for social and political changes in the history of the country.

From 1776 up to the passage of the thirteen, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments in the post-war period, slavery and the pangs of the uniformity of color bar best known as segregation in American life and culture remained dominant. Many heroes and heroines have come and gone since that time and their legacies have come to constitute building blocks for a better and more human America.

In looking into the Obama election, therefore, I would like to say here that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have come to dominate our minds and condition the manner in which our human self is shaped and affected by American life and culture. From Civil War to rapid scientific and technological changes in the nineteenth and twentieth century, America has crossed many bounders.

Not only has the nation changed demographically from a solid Anglo-Saxon territory with thirteen states into a confederacy and later a union, it has also evolved over time to fifty states plus other smaller pieces of real estates such as Puerto Rico, Guam and others.

This political evolution was not only marked by the greater number of states but by the transformation of the dominant group from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism to a large white population with genes drawn from almost every pat of the European continent.

This process would gradually expand to include Asian elements that at one point were bared by the now forgotten Asian Exclusion Act. History, in its games of paradoxes and ironies, pushed and pulled America into several global wars and as a result her population added new names and faces that are best kept secret by the graves of American soldiers in the Civil War, the first and second world wars. The process continued in Korea, Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq.

In all these American encounters with others on foreign soil her people were destined to change and to accommodate. This is why I have argued that American presidents have been selected by the American people largely because of historical challenges that force most of us to see ourselves in a new light.

America changed in 1960 to elect a Catholic and that election changed America for good. Then it was a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant nation with significant Catholic minority; today, when Barack Obama is elected the religious barrier that presented a Catholic from coming to the White House was forgotten and the last formidable obstacle, race and color, submitted to the American change of heart with respect to racism in American life.

Although people may continue to debate as to the social and moral forces that go into the creation of these changes in the society and culture, the fact is, that in the eternal debate between politics and culture, one could say with some degree of certainty that culture shaped the minds of many of the young people and politics served as the warning signals for the older and more ideologically committed to what they knew before the emergence of Obama.

Perhaps the cultural forces that shaped the minds of the young who voted for Obama are the children of the Internet, the cell phone, the I pod and the older instrument called the Walkman. With these gadgets at their service and with their gradual and firm rejections of age-old racial prejudices, their generation apparently chose change and in consequence denied Senator McCain the Golden Fleece.

Future writers and historians of the Obama phenomenon and the landslide nature of his victory will note this fact. And the old Senator from Arizona himself provided some of the memorable words that would add flavor to those who choose to remember such a history. His line about Booker T. Washington and the public outright against his invitation to the White House at a period time in national history when racism ruled supreme in the South. Related to this is the warning he gave to his strong and would-be supporters about the line of political defeat that would connect him with the dots of political biographies of Goldwater, Udall and others. No mother of a child from Arizona, he contended, would ever say the celebrated words of urging a child to aim for the presidency.

Obama's victory now tells a different story to African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and children of more recently immigrant Asians who now live as Americans with all rights and interest as their fellow white citizens. What the Obama election tells me is that what John F. Kennedy did for all Catholics regardless of their countries of origins and race, Obama has done for all minorities who felt heretofore excluded from the highest office of the land. This, in my view, is the restoration of America's moral currency, a fact that has occupied my attention over the last seven years when our efforts aboard brought fear and hate among foreigners. Hopefully, the enthusiasm of the American people that brought Obama to the White House would be strong enough to inspire nationalities of other lands to share our feelings and hope against hope that Americans will once again remain as human as everyone and as creative and ingenious as ever.

Let us see how history will play itself out. Obama is a phenomenon just like John F. Kennedy. If Kennedy linked us to the world through the Peace Corps and raised our interstellar dreams through the space program, perhaps Obama too would see things that John F. Kennedy could not see and witness in the skies. Perhaps history in its games of new discovery and innovations through science and technology will yield products the Reagan, the Bushes and the Clintons were not lucky enough to see.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Sulayman Nyang

Posts By Category

Posts By Date

Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama