Yes We Can

Nov 8th , 2008

Watching Obama say these words gave me goose bumps. For the first time after a long time I actually cared about America and its people.  I don’t know when I forgot them. Must have been sometime through those eight forgettable years that have just gone by.

The earliest memory of America, though I have never been there, was the fateful night when I sat huddled in front of a TV set with a bunch of other Indian kids while the grownups watched from over their couches and dinner plates. The Iraqis on the streets couldn’t do enough to deter a resilient Indian soiree. Bush Sr was talking about the goings-on in the middle-east, the invasion of Kuwait. I still remember his wrinkled, meditative words heavily pouring out. War it was.

I am a child of the Gulf War. Americans were our heroes.  Play and chatter was abundant with the imagery of good-evil transferred to the America-Iraq scenario. America was the good guy. That was 1990.

Operation Desert Storm. Bosnia. Somalia. Kosovo.  Operation Desert Fox.  The ten years that followed were a series of conflicts relayed in a carefully reconstructed manner always readily identifying the bad guy. Of course we knew who the good guys were. Didn’t we? Growing up to these events brought on some questions. Yet one never doubted the intention. America meant no harm. They fought for the people, their rights and their good. Well there were other ways of doing it but no other would step up to the task so readily. That was America doing what it did best, playing the good guy.

Then came the new millennium and with it brought controversy, doubt and eventually, decay. Controversy over the how the man got into the office, doubt over his capability and judgment, and finally the decay of the American spirit and also the good will that America had fostered in minds like mine. George Walker Bush had done everything humanly possible to open the wrong doors, rub people the wrong way, all the while carrying a straight face of a man driven by vision and purpose.

9/11 forever changed the world we lived in. But Afghanistan and later Iraq were hasty responses to a blow on the very face of the American spirit. The need of the hour was determination, resilience and thoughtful intervention. What has come to be does not even qualify debate. Could it have been different? May be. Should it have been so bad? Definitely not. Four years ago, for reasons unknown, at least to many outside America, Bush was re-elected to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. The second term of W is something I can’t wait to forget, and I am not alone. Bad policy is very different from ignorance. Persistent and worsening ignorance can only be judged as idiocy. God bless America became God save America.

As with all things, the Bush years have come to pass. Every American who voted Obama on the ballot represented the hopes of the entire world. People from every corner who directly or indirectly were beneficiaries or victims, as times have it, of American policy of recent years held their breath as America went to the polls. The world was glued to its TVs, radios and computers awaiting the outcomes of their suffering, the fruit of the hopes they had invested in the common citizen of the USA. And they weren’t let down.

The words of change the new president of America had on the eve of his victory were not for his people alone but for people world over. The man on stage in front of America today was not just a leader America voted for, he was chosen by all of us around the world who wanted to see the guiding light in new hands. Watching intently, I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I saw him speak with conviction and promise of restoring America to its lost glory.

Obama is not just a man or a leader or a president. He is an idea. An image of the power and will of the people, invested in one man. America has once again beat the odds and managed to make that leap of faith. Less than 50 years after Martin Luther King, they have elected as president a young, black man who has the tenacity to challenge, the will to persevere and courage to transform. He represents an opportunity for America to try something new, to show the world a new direction and to make possible tolerant and peaceful coexistence. It is a chance to abandon a rampant ruthless barbarism, both fundamental and state-sponsored, that is scarring the lives of millions of people and bring back an era of dialogue and non-violence. A man who does not carry the weight of years of electoral politics, who is not hardened by the unforgiving corridors of Washington and entrenched in the interests of the high and the mighty brings with him a sense of honesty to the table. This alone will give Obama what few other presidents have enjoyed, the respect and adulation of the peoples of the world and above all a chance, to break ice and foster brotherhood.

Economy. Trade. Healthcare. Foreign Policy. World Peace. Obama’s mandate, rather the legacy he stands to inherit, is unenviable to say the least. Yet even the longest journeys start with a small step. And with Obama, America has taken a giant leap. Four years on, I look forward to remembering these times as a period of great change when I stood witness as history unfolded and a new paradigm shift came to be in the way the people of America, the people of the world lived.

Mr. Barrack Hussein Obama, Yes we can.