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["Jeanne Driese" <jeanne13 AT earthlink.net>]

No matter how we feel about the United states, or how good or bad we think 
the coming years will be this man's words made me feel very good about my 
country again.  He said it all so very well.  Now my hope is that this Nation 
will follow through.  Just my two cents worth.   
Jeanne

>From 11/20/2008 *Washington Post*:

The Man of Tomorrow His election has turned America's global image on its 
head.
By Desmond Tutu

CAPE TOWN I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief and wonder. It can't be true that 
Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, is the next president of the United 
States. But it is true, exhilaratingly true. An unbelievable turnaround. I 
want to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in 
my native South Africa on April 27, 1994.

We owe our glorious victory over the awfulness of apartheid in South Africa 
in large part to the support we received from the international community, 
including the United States, and we will always be deeply grateful. But for 
those of us who have looked to America for inspiration as we struggled for 
democracy and human rights, these past seven years have been lean ones.

A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we had our first 
shock, hearing your president respond not with the statesmanlike demeanor we 
had come to expect from a U.S. head of state but like a Western gunslinger. 
Later, it seemed that much of American society was following his lead.

When war began, first in Afghanistan and not long after in Iraq, we read 
allegations of prisoner abuse at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and of 
rendition to countries notorious for practicing torture. We saw the horrific 
images from Abu Ghraib and learned of gruesome acts performed in the name of 
gathering information. Sometimes the torture itself was couched in the 
government's euphemisms -- calling water-boarding an "interrogation 
technique."

To the outgoing administration's record on torture we must add a string of 
other policies that have damaged the standing of the United States in the 
world: its hostility to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases; its refusal 
to assent to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 
establishing the ICC's role in prosecuting war crimes; its restrictions on 
the use of U.S. funding to fight AIDS; and the arrogant unilateralism it has 
employed in declaring to be enemies any countries it deemed "against us" 
because they were not "for us."

The Bush administration has riled people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude 
has sadly polarized our world.

Against all this, the election of Barack Obama has turned America's image on 
its head. My wife was crying with incredulity and joy as we watched a 
broadcast of the celebrations in Chicago. A newspaper here ran a picture of 
Obama from an earlier trip to one of our townships, where he was mobbed by 
youngsters. It was tacitly saying that we are proud he once visited us.

Today Africans walk taller than they did a week ago -- just as they did when 
Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. Not only 
Africans, but people everywhere who have been the victims of discrimination 
at the hands of white Westerners, have a new pride in who they are. If a 
dark-skinned person can become the leader of the world's most powerful 
nation, what is to stop children everywhere from aiming for the stars? The 
fact that Obama's Kenyan grandfather was a convert to Islam may -- shamefully 
-- have been controversial in parts of the United States, but elsewhere in 
the world, Obama's multi-faith heritage is an inspiration.

And the president-elect has one additional key quality: He is not George W. 
Bush.

Because the Bush years have been disastrous for other parts of the world in 
many ways, Obama's victory dramatizes the self-correcting mechanism that 
epitomizes American democracy. Elsewhere, oppressors, tyrants and their 
lapdogs can say what they like, and they stay put, for the most part. 
Ordinary citizens living in undemocratic societies are not fools; they may 
not always agree with U.S. foreign policy, but they can see and register the 
difference between the United States, where people can kick an unpopular 
political party out, of their own countries.

In the midst of this celebration, however, a word of caution is appropriate. 
In the first days after 9/11, the United States had the world's sympathy, an 
unprecedented wave of it. President Bush squandered it. Obama could squander 
the goodwill that his election has generated if he does not move quickly and 
decisively on the international front.

On human rights, President Obama needs to signal the changes his 
administration will bring by speedily taking a few high-profile symbolic 
actions. One might be to close that abomination, the detention facility at 
Guantanamo Bay. Another could be immediate replacement of guidelines on the 
treatment of detainees, thus putting the United States back in the mainstream 
of international humanitarian law. He could launch a comprehensive inquiry 
into who authorized torture and when. And it would be wonderful if, on behalf 
of the nation, he would apologize to the world, and especially the Iraqis, 
for an invasion that I believe has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

On humanitarian issues, he will be hard-pressed in the ongoing global 
financial crisis to match the current administration's generally admirable 
record. President Bush has succeeded in working with Congress to devote 
unprecedented amounts of money to fighting malaria, tuberculosis and 
HIV/AIDS. But if the United States is to show that it places as much value on 
a human life in Africa as on one in the United States, Obama actually has to 
improve on Bush's achievements.

Obama's election has given Americans the message that hope is viable, that 
change is really possible. He galvanized huge numbers of his compatriots 
across the board, particularly young people who had become disillusioned with 
politics. He drew huge numbers of volunteers and raised record amounts of 
money, not just in donations from the wealthy but in relatively small amounts 
from many so-called ordinary people. Judging by the reception he received in 
Berlin earlier this year, he has given the world similar hope.

The renowned African scholar Ali Mazrui has pointed out that Obama could 
never have gotten as far as he has without an exceptional level of trust on 
the part of white Americans. In this, his achievement is similar to what 
Nelson Mandela had achieved by the end of his presidency; Mandela's party may 
never have drawn a majority of white votes, but he has come to be revered by 
white as well as black South Africans as the founding father of our democracy.

Mazrui likens Obama to Mandela in other ways, saying that both men share a 
readiness to forgive and show "a remarkable capacity to transcend historical 
racial divides." Both, Mazrui says, are "potential icons of a post-racial age 
which is unfolding before our eyes."

Such a post-racial age for me has the characteristics of a rainbow. We are in 
a different time now than when I first spoke of a rainbow nation, describing 
the South Africa that Mandela led for the first time in 1994. But my vision 
for such a place remains. It is a place where people of each race and 
cultural group exhibit their own unique identity, their own distinct 
attributes, but where the beauty of the whole gloriously exceeds the sum of 
its parts.

Obama is the son of a Kenyan man and a Kansan woman. He spoke movingly about 
his background during his long campaign. Now he's the president-elect. His 
triumph can help the world reach the point where we realize that we are all 
caught up in a delicate network of interdependence, unable to celebrate fully 
our own heritage and place in the world, unable to realize our full potential 
as human beings, unless everyone else, everywhere else, can do the same.

Desmond Tutu is the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town. He won the Nobel Peace 
Prize in 1984.


 




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