LESSONS LEARNT FROM OBAMA!

The tide has turned. History has been made. The dream has become a reality. The hitherto unthinkable has become a norm. What do you personally learn from the Obama phenomenon. Well, below are some inspiring lessons:

* Your background is no reason for your back to be on the ground:
The underdog can also become the overlord. Obama – my computer still doesn’t recognise his name – was clearly disadvantaged from the beginning. When he started out, his great albatross wasn’t the colour of his skin, germane as that was. The number one bogey was the circumstance of his birth – he is a first generation immigrant! An orphan, he was raised by a doting grandmother in Hawaii who died on the eve of the election (but after she had cast her vote).

The youngest black man in the united states senate. Only two years in the senate. A political upstart, he had never been in the mainstream of American politics. Never served in the US army, a hitherto unspoken prerequisite for the oval office. He suddenly emerged from the sidelines of history and climbed onto its centre stage.

Was it chance? Destiny? Or sheer doggedness and the tenacity of a bull? Or was it just God working in anonymity? Perhaps all. But Obama was prepared to ally himself with all four by being there when they were working!

* Prepare for opportunity before it comes:From that day in 2004 when he was given the opportunity to be the keynote speaker at the congress of the democratic party, Obama hit the ground running. His speech stirred up the hearts of everyone present and fanned the waning embers of the American dream that was well on its way to becoming the American nightmare. This immigrant from some nondescript corner of Kenya and Hawaii became the cynosure of all political eyes. From that moment in time, American, nay world history was being rewritten! Was Obama caught by surprise? You bet not.

This was the moment he had lived for. It was the physical manifestation of a mental reality he had lived in from the time he took the decision to stretch the American dream to its fullest possible extent. He was simply acting out the lead role in the drama for which he had painstakingly rehearsed. This was his hour of glory. The klieg lights under which he gave his victory speech, the unprecedented crowd that gathered to listen to it and every other thing else in that atmosphere only came to pay tribute to the savvy of a man who had calculatedly prepare for this hour. After all, Champions are not made in the ring, they are only manifested there!

* Where there is a dream, there is a possibility:
Dreams are free. Our highest dream merely introduce us to ourselves and the possibilities ahead of us. Visionaries rule the world; for the simple reason that dreamers mentally live in the realm of the ideal.

They stretch the boundaries that status quo tries to set in concrete. All the ideas that have shaped civilization have come from dreamers who refused to allow their loftiest visions to be buried in the vicious cesspool of the mundane.

America itself was discovered by a dreamer called Christopher Columbus who sailed from England to go to India, just to prove his conviction that the world was not flat. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and other spearheads of the civil rights movement. Think of Nelson Mandela who was willing to die in jail rather than allow his dream to be corrupted or hijacked by the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Martin Luther King Jr., declared that he had gone to the mountaintop and like Moses; He had seen the Promised Land even if he would not personally enter it. In time, history moved America towards it.

* Hope is a universal commodity:Hope is the compass that guides to a predetermined future. It is the elixir of the dreamer. Every Farmer ploughs in hope. Dreams alone are not enough. Without hope, dreams can become nightmares! No man has lost anything until he has lost the capacity to hope.

Obama did not proffer any high flouting, never been seen before “Obamanomics” as a panacea for the myriad of problems facing the American people at this time. He simply offered a change on the platform of hope. It wasn’t going to be a magical wave of the wand thing but he assured them it would come. He didn’t tell Americans what they cannot do, he told them about what they can. He let them know that no matter how bad things are, even grasshoppers can hop! As they say, even a dead clock is right twice a day!

* God has no colour:
God recognizes only one race – the human race. Anyone who thinks Obama’s victory is for the black race needs a rethink. It is not. It is victory of the human race over bigotry, over colour, over class. It is the victory of every underdog regardless of colour of skin. It is as Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, the era of being judged according to the content of one’s character, rather than colour of skin.

In his campaign, Obama never came across as a black man. Neither did he portray himself as an upper stiff lip deviant from his biological antecedents. He came out as a clean citizen of the world! The crowds at his rallies were a mix of all races, Caucasian, Latino, Negroid etc.

The Obama phenomenon is a signal to every black man in Diaspora who is still bogged down by the paralysing excuse of a history of colonialism, slavery etc, this is the time to wake up and take responsibility for our destiny. We must be willing to compete in the universal enterprise called the human race and stop blaming circumstances for our deprivation. After all, slave trade was a series of business transactions! Our ancestors sold their own kith and kin and were paid for their efforts with gunpowder, plenty of gin, mirrors etc.

To the African American, it is time to wean your children from the dehumanizing culture of the “hood” – violence, gangs, drugs, irresponsible sex, illiteracy, teenage motherhood, alcoholism etc. Whatever it takes, keep them out of the jailhouses and for God’s sake, get them into schools and vocational centres. Give them a vision of hope they can believe in.

Obama’s election does not give an automatic invitation to every man of colour to come to the White House or to turn the White House to the Black House, but it does send the signal to all that where there is a dream, there is a future.

To the teeming millions of young and old men of vision, I have one counsel: “NEVER, NEVER EVER GIVE UP!”

More inspiring, soul-lifting lessons from Obama shall be dicussed in our subsequent posts. To view pictures from Obama's Historic Inauguration click here:Paid Online Survey

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