Obama=Nobel. The only ethical response is gratitude

October 9, 10:58 AMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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President Barack Obama (AP Photo)

The announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize going to Mr. Obama is probably the very best gift this country has ever received from anyone at anytime since the founding of the nation. It says everything the bloggers have been saying that it says, and more.

It says the rest of the world is happy that we no longer have George W. Bush in the White House, and Cheney in the bunker issuing commands, a common thread among bloggers and commentators.

It says that Mr. Obama’s message of hope was more conducive to the safety of the world than any number of messages of weakness clothed in bellicose rhetoric and actions of false bravado … the face this nation had presented to the world for eight exceedingly long years. This, too, is a common reaction in blogs and comments.

It says that the rest of the world believes that Mr. Obama can and will deliver on as much of his promise as it is possible for a person to do, especially when faced with the craven and sniggering and narcissistic opposition that seeps out of every Republican pore in the nation. Not so common a reaction, but very likely true as well.

Some morons have said they thought it cheapened the award for Mr. Obama to receive it, especially since the decision was made only two weeks into his presidency. How shallow. The people who bestow this amazing prize are not idiots; the people who think that they are, however, display several arresting characteristics. Notably, these are envy, inanity, narcissism, self-loathing.

Self-loathing? Of course. How could anyone…anyone…denigrate this great gift, this wondrous acknowledgement of achievement and possibility unless they loathe themselves so thoroughly that they cannot for one minute identify with another American who has achieved so much and promises so much more? Clearly, anyone who would find some convoluted method of disparaging this event but nonetheless lives in America must be counted as two things: a pitiable husk of a human with no regard for himself/herself or anyone else, and a traitor.

It is easy to recall that the right wing went nuts with glee when the Olympics was awarded to Rio. Childish. Laughable. Still, all that mockery gave us hint of who they were, but not a portrait.

Their reaction to Mr. Obama’s selection as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace paints that picture abundantly clearly. The rightwing conservatives are a knot of angry red contagion in an otherwise peaceful and grateful nation. The rightwing conservatives are a deep well of all the least attractive qualities a human can possess, including greed, envy, dishonesty, jealousy, absence of common sense, absence of common decency.

The right studiously avoids logic, so much so that, within an hour of the award, their raucous shills were heard on the airwaves searching for ways to make a good thing bad. One commentator said the wingnuts have figured out how to turn lemonade back into lemons.

The right wing conservatives studiously avoid celebration, except of negatives, i.e., Rio. In their pitiable black hearts, they cannot find even one word of praise or support or gratitude or even acceptance when anyone who believes differently from them achieves or receives anything of note.

Is it ethical, what they are doing? Patently not. It is never ethical, it cannot be ethical, to engage in assassination of another’s good fortune or excellent work. In what they are doing, they are unethically assassinating the spirit of this nation, just as they assassinate the character of Mr. Obama, now and every other day since he upset their little cart of poisoned apples last November.

Ethically, this nation must turn its back on the empty howls of the right wing. Ethically, we must isolate them until they choke on their own spleen, or come to a realization that what is good for the nation is good for them, and not vice versa. Vice versa is how we got into this mess. Messers Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft et al and Ms. Rice thought that what was good for them would be good for the nation. And we are all suffering through the way that worked out.

It is time for Congress to acquire some of the belief that carried Mr. Obama to the presidency and push through the programs that are needed for this country, that are needed for any country, but which we have a unique opportunity to enact.

• Health care for all. It is time for “insurance” to be removed from the equation, except if it is done as in Switzerland, with the government owning the insurance companies and therefore, subject to regulation and the will of the electorate.
• Education as it was meant to be, education of ideas and not of multiple choice tests and enrichment of Mr. Bush’s brother Neil. Neil Bush founded Ignite, an educational software company, in 1999. To date, it has sold at least 13 U.S. school districts its products at $3,800 apiece (with multiple units needed per school). But that’s the tip of the iceberg: the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (Moonies) has “peppered classrooms throughout Virginia with Ignite's COWs under a $1-million grant.”
• Decent work, even if public monies prime the pump. With an unemployment rate of close to 10 percent, it is time to wrest the ill-gotten gains back from the banks and use them to educate medical personnel, teachers and business managers; to put craftspeople to work creating and building and revising infrastructure and more; even to contract some public artworks as was done in FDR’s government. Artists have to eat, too, and we are all the poorer when there is no public art to gladden us.

We must, ethically, use the momentum this marvelous honor brings with it. If a person or an organization is too small to celebrate an award earned by another, then we must move beyond them…around, over, under, or through…but we must move onward.

Finally, we must do one major thing. It’s not an ethically necessary thing, exactly. But it is as spiritually necessary as was the election of Mr. Obama in the first place.

We must breathe deeply, drink in the fresh air of generosity and possibility (Mr. Obama’s and the Nobel committee’s, and the rest of the world for not annihilating us when we were so forcefully headed down such wrong paths), expand our minds and hearts and souls, dedicate ourselves to moving onward in a better way than we used to get where we are now, and say Thank You.