I was born a person "of privilege". I went to private schools, spent summers in Europe. As a child learning history, with a child's sense of justice, I gravitated to the classic American stories, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the words in those treatise moved me. "All men are created equal" and "We hold these truths to be self evident" are my oldest memories, imprinted in sound. Stories of freed slaves moved me deeply. Of course, I was a child, who also wrote poems about the noble pathos of lions in zoos. There are some things we understand best as children.
As a teenager, during my first travels on my own overseas I came across a European magazine. One article described key aspects of the cultures of different countries. Until it got around to America, and I saw my country for the first time as seen through the eyes of others, of the world. The United States, it said, is troubling in that it isn't held together by a culture, it is a recipient of various cultures and all of the things we have been discussing in this article do not apply. What holds this disparate mass of people together, the article said, in a rather concerned fashion for us, was a belief in principles. Abstract principles, it said, ominously. As as the article continued, it was easy to see how implausible America looked to others non-culture of individuals with different values held together with saddle stitches.
So I learned something about my own identity as a U.S. citizen. In our school system, public or private, we are taught as children, when our sense of justice is most clear and our ability to empathize not yet numbed, the story of our forefathers declaring principles. That we hold these truths to be self evident. Not just that all men are created equal. But that principles are important. They are the bedrock of our culture and our nation.
We forget the light we have been in the world because all children understand justice in a universal way, just as I did.
Only our country has articulated these principles as a guiding light and bedrock, held them up as an ideal in our politics, system of law and culture, in the stories by Harriet Tubman and the Gettysburg Address. But throughout the world in every age and every country, from the villages of Africa to the forlorn Siberian outposts men and women have articulated these rights with their actions, their words and their lives.
We are vastly cynical now. Our people are so poorly educated that they do not even know the actions our nation have taken over the years which have been retaliated against. Bin Laden himself got the idea for bombing buildings, according to one of his messages, when he was in Beirut in the early 1980's. The city was being bombed before his eye to smithereens with American weapons operated by the Israelis. That is where and when the first suicide bomber walked into a building and blew himself up. This is where and when Bin Laden decided he would do the same to us.
The sad part of it all is not what we have or haven't done to deserve 9/11 but that perhaps .0001% of our population even thinks about the bombing of Beirut, then a modern city, and the horror it created. They didn't forget, they never knew.
I knew, I was a student in France. The son of a professor a the American University in Beirut, Lebanon was in my French class. One day he walked up to the black board and drew an plane in chalk with little chalk bombs and an arrow at them ---> U. S.
On the night of September 11, 2001 I went to an opening of McCormick's and Schmidt in Seattle where I lived. Already everyone was wearing little flag pins, but I would not put one on. I loved my country, but I did not trust what my country would do in my name. I was afraid for us.
In the afternoon after 9/11 I walked around the inner city block downstairs from my condo, talking to the Indonesian convenience store owners the Indian taxi drivers, the Italian restauranteur. Everyone knew what I did, why they hate us. Everyone but us.
Today Lebanon remains reduced to a tiny country perpetual factionalized. It takes a pulitzer prize winner to adequately describe the alliances fighting for power there. The heartland of America may never understand it.
The rest of the world has written us off as a narcissistic, debt-laden, fear-mongering, Bush-electing, culture-eradicating bully with great entertainment exports. We elected Bush, not once but twice. The small amount of voter fraud only proves the point about us, that our system is corrupt and our values cynically co-opted to support wars of aggression.
The world is not just cynical about America. They hate us.
In the next two weeks, we have an opportunity to show the world what democracy means. That we are greater than our history of slavery and racism. And that democracy is stronger than international capitalism which has run our elections and country for eight years.
Sometimes the answer to the question does not exist in universe of the question. Our ability to elect a black name named Barrack Hussein Obama on the quality of his character will say more than diplomacy or sanctions or speeches.
We will show that a nation which believes in principles will elect by a landslide a black man of mixed race, son of a Kenyan. We will do this while Europe continues to elect only its own ethnically pure. It is a message that could never be written. A photograph of Obama with a caption will do. We are no longer an English nation. A nation that caught the ball of colonialism and turned it into imperialism.
We are a nation of people who believe in principles, not over tribalism, ethnicity and religion but to protect those who are tribal, ethnic and religious. These principles are what our forefathers articulated and died for once in the revolution and again in the civil war.
When we elect Barak Hussein Obama president of the United States of America on November 2, the world will be perplexed, but secretly they will dance in the streets for us. We will again be a nation of leaders.