I rejoiced in the Obama's Nobel Prize but wondered, like a lot of folks, "what for." Then a friend of mine from overseas wrote me. She said that Americans, including his supporters (like me) grossly underestimate the effect he has had on the world. If I understood his effect, I wouldn't wonder, she told me. She was right.
I have been playing with an idea that grows from my anger at flag wavers and my ambivalence about over the top displays of patriotism. I always feel a disconnect with my fellow citizens when folks well up at the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, the saying of the Pledge, stories of military victories, or other displays of pomp and circumstance. All of these things seem divorced from what I love about this country. To me it is not a place, though I love its natural beauty. Nor a set of heroes, though I find inspiration in the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lincolns, Roosevelts, Kennedys, Kings, Chief Josephs, Tubmans, Milks, Whitmans, Melvilles, Copelands, Gershwins and countless others. Nor is it a set of symbols, though I cried at the Lincoln Memorial, meditated on the Iwo Jima memorial, pondered the crater at the World Trade Center, listened to the echoes of guns past at Antietam and Gettysburg, and marveled at the view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Highlands as the fog rolls in. Nor is it our particular version of democracy or economy or government, which as often as not has been a source of great brutality and pain, as they have been of justice and truth.
None of these things make our country unique. All nations and all peoples have their leaders, poets, beauty, symbols, and historic highpoints and lowpoints. What sets my heart a-pitter patter, what stirs my sense of patriotism, is that America is as much an idea, an aspiration shared by all peoples, as it is a nation and a point in time. When I hear jingoists calling for the need to keep people out of "our country," to shout for the defeat and death of foreigners so that we Americans can feel safer, I despair. I believe deeply that America does not belong to Americans. Rather, those of us fortunate enough to live here and enjoy the nation's blessings are stewards of the idea, the hope, for freedom and justice, which belongs to all peoples, regardless of where they live. And we should live in the world and govern ourselves accordingly.
In this light, the world's embrace of Obama is greater than that of his own countrymen. They don't care about Bush, or Democrats or Republicans, or Limbaughs or Becks, or who is in or who is out in our halls of government. I really don't think they care about Obama the man so much. However, what he means to the rest of the world is that the idea of America is still alive. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country!" What I have learned from my friends overseas is that Obama has rekindled that hope. For anyone capable of inspiring that kind of hope, any prize is more than deserved.