Now! (CC9)

The year was 1990. I was standing in front of the television screen, waiting, anticipating. When the Prison gates opened, Nelson Mandela appeared – beaming and beautiful. I was overcome with awe for this man who had confronted the ugly side of race and culture, endured 26 years of imprisonment and emotional and physical battering, and emerged calm in the mist of chaos. He looked presidential despite the enormous pressures and great expectations surrounding him, and he remained an unfailing believer in the best within people instead of succumbing to the bitterness he must have at times felt from the actions he had endured at the hands of the worse of people.

I believe that we are now being given the gift to participate in another moment like that, a moment that will be a landmark for our generation, a moment that your grand-children will read about in order to understand what our generation stood for. On the other side of Canada’s border a historic election will occur in November: 45 years after Dr. Martin Luther King gave his speech sharing his dream of a world in which no person was judged based on the colour of their skin, and 40 years after Dr. King gave his life for that cause, we are witnessing a giant step in the journey towards the achievement of Dr. King’s dream: Barrack Obama is running a very credible campaign for the presidency of the United States of America.

I am here to persuade you to do more than watch, to get excited, to join in this journey, and to dare to participate in this moment.

Why should you bother? Because given the size of its resources, the U.S. leadership influences greatly the direction of lives well beyond its own borders, including your own. You may not have a U.S. vote, but you, like Dr. King, have a view of how you would like this world to be. I sense that your aspirations are more consistent with the values of Obama than those of that other candidate.

Obama has a world view that is willing to communicate with foreign governments, even those that do not agree with the U.S.. This is very important. Back in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela in a large town-hall session in America, was asked why America should consider him and the ANC a friend when he sometimes held different views from America and had allies that America did not approve of. His answer was consummately intelligent and courageous. He in essence stated: “We cannot expect our friends to agree with us on everything; moreover it is likely to be unhealthy for us if they do”. We know this makes sense – imagine how we would degenerate as individuals if we began to view everyone who disagreed with us as enemies. Obama got his early exposure to organizing people via his involvement in anti-apartheid rallies as at student, and later working on the ground with ethnically-diverse Chicago communities. He has clearly allowed the experiences of Gandhi and King and Mandela to shape his views that not all foreign policy problems lend themselves to a military solution, and that in many instances grassroots movements and bottom-up development are the most effective agents of lasting change.

Obama understands that people – whether in Zimbabwe under the sick government of Robert Mugabe or in Venezuela under the socialist government of Chavez – aspire to the same things, a reasonable standard of living, consistent safety for their family, and decent education for their children. Obama understands that the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are not rights that only Americans should have a monopoly on. I believe Obama would provide U.S. leadership that would use the U.S. flag as a foundation on which a coherent set of values governing the U.S. meddling abroad would be built, versus the Bush-McCain approach of using it as a blind-fold to over-look values and facts that do not suit their short-sighted vision of American self-interest.

How do you participate? In the years leading up to the successful collapse of South African apartheid we learnt that the dollars in our hands and the words in our mouth had power. So in Jamaica we spoke positively about the change we dreamed of living to witness. When cynics would say “Apartheid will always exist” we would respond that “Apartheid may continue to exist, but we will continue making it clear that we consider it wrong”; or when doubters would say “Those who keep apartheid going are too politically and economically powerful to be displaced “we would respond “Then we will weaken them where it hurts – in their pockets and by winning South Africans of all colours to the cause”. This is your opportunity to do likewise. Respond to the cynics and the doubters; or get your “Obama 08” bumper sticker; or display a “change we can believe in” flyer. Don’t stand paralysed by the fear spread by those who still think in black and white. Do not ignore the similarities between yourself and this man – the similar values; the desire to deal with the issues confronting those who don’t earn a millions of dollars a year; and the interest in improving relationships between people of diverse backgrounds. Don’t ignore all those shared values and instead focus on what may be the one difference, the colour of his skin. And don’t swallow your tongue when someone cynically says “What difference can Obama make”. Instead dare to say, “Maybe none; that is the risk we take every time we try a new approach. However with Obama we have a great possibility that positive change will occur, with the alternative we have no such possibility.”

My friends this is the last 5 minutes of the journey, if you are going to participate in making history happen, the time is now!