generalspeaking

The Measure of a Man

The United States of America is a country that is unique on the world stage.  It is a militarily, technologically powerful, giant state of a nation.  Extremely well endowed with both human resources in intelligence and scientific discoveries and financial-business enterprise, as well as plentiful natural resources, its economy remains the largest in the world, its influence the greatest of all other nations, bar none. 

Its social and political values are theoretically second to none, and its outreach within the international community is balanced between furthering the human potential for approaching justice, even while there are institutional elements that engage behind the scenes in work of spurious value in advancing human relations.  But when judging and comparing countries it is exceptional.

There are Scandinavian countries that are also exceptional socially and politically and their human value as examples of what small countries can aspire to and accomplish to the benefit of the entire citizenry is a remarkable example of human resilience, determination and ingenuity - and they too have great influence on the world stage.

But a country whose population is over a third of a billion people, whose geographic territory takes a third of a continent, and whose realpolitik has earned it both praise and censure, represents a truly unique nation.  Whose self-assessed responsibility to the rest of the world as its sheriff attempting to declare for fairness and justice often leaves it in a quandary of decision-making when things go wrong, as they so often do, given the unpredictability of human nature.

When the first bi-racial Black president became a reality, a man of mixed ancestry with all that it entailed, including ethnicity, tribalism and religion, it was felt that the United States as the world knew it had turned a corner on its own troubled past.  And this man who enraptured the American public with his calm demeanor and aristocratic self-assurance, his pledge to 'do things differently', holding out hope for his entranced followers soon discovered that he could do a lot of things, but not all things.

The Nobel Peace Prize making Barack Hussein Obama a Laureate was hope personified and it was vastly precipitate.  He has not yet earned it, and likely never will.  His innate self-assurance is no match for a world of explosive human relations, weighted heavily with human fallibility.  He is an ordinary man of slightly extraordinary abilities, no match for adversity on a world scale, and perhaps no one could be.  Does he resolve the problems that confront him?  No, of course he does not, because he cannot.

He can do as did his predecessors, as befits reaction in the highest political position in the land, for he has little other choice.  And, unfortunately, that choices that are given to him are all too often choices that he deigns not to select, and in his way disappoints one-half of the electorate while infuriating the other half.

Labels: Political Realities, That's Life, Traditions, United States, Viewpoint

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 17, 2012