Well, it's been now a few days since that announcement one early morning last week. The frisky and sometimes vitriolic debate is by no means subsiding. And that is both from the left and from the right and all the places in between. Ideological accusations, summary condemnations, demeaning belittling, and all sorts of similarly colored declarations fly all over the public spectrum.
I am sitting back and thinking of one simple thing. Folks are asking "what has he done?" as if the president is supposed to take a hammer in his hands and actually physically create something or lock up folks in a basement and make them love each other. We forget that the president is a politicians, he is a manager. And what do those folks do? Well, they offer a vision and facilitate creation of an environment in which folks would want to make that vision a reality. Their power is their vision expressed in their words.
If we can accept that, then let's see what President Obama has done.
- Has he offered a vision for the country and for the world? Judge for yourself.
- Has he intrigued and mobilized masses of people in this country and around the world and created an atmosphere in which multitudes can adopt his vision, however it may be modified through a personal prism, and work on its realization? Judge for yourself.
Has he created enemies? or at least made them come out of the woodwork? Sure he has.
Another way to look at the "controversy" is to see what Nobel Peace Prize Committee offered as their reasoning behind awarding the prize to President Obama. They said that they awarded President Obama the prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Only two questions are relevant:
- is that a good reason to reward a person with a prize and
- is that a true characterization of President Obama's work
Anything else is superfluous and serves as self-aggrandizing, self-righteous posturing.
If your answer to the first question is no, so be it! It is an opinion one way or another which can not be scientifically supported by facts. It is a judgment call, which is why the prize is awarded by a committee of people, not by some computer program. Once you have your own committee for your own prize to be awarded out, you can set your own, presumably better, rules.
As for the answer to the second question, that too can not be scientifically proven or disputed - ergo a committee to pass judgment. Yours may be different and so "once you have ..... "
So feel free to feel one way or another, but, please focus on the right questions.
