Opinion: �A New World-Order�

If you were of age in the mid-sixties of the last century, especially, if you were African or African/American, you would have witnessed, willy-nilly, the event in which an African-American had gotten admission into the University of Alabama, but was refused matriculation, based on racial grounds. The young man, James Meredith, was born and bred, however, in the USA. The man at the white house at the time was the successor to President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas Texas, in November 1963, after having reigned for one thousand days only. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan who believed nevertheless in Civil Rights (Democrats were then liberals galore), and had most of the bills initiated by Kennedy endorsed and made into law, tried his best to keep James Meredith at the University on the �strength� of Federal Law, to no avail. The young �Nigerien�s� life would be too much in danger in Alabama. So, believe it or not, a place was found at a Nigerian University for the young but �different American� to study away from home against his will. As it turned out, James could not easily adjust to life in Africa at the time. The �deal� did not work, and he returned home in some confusedly charged race-politics, too intricate to fit into an exercise, this length. A racist Governor in Alabama, by name of George Wallace, chanted a slogan at the time, and it went like this;� segregation yesterday, segregation today, and segregation tomorrow!� He, the Governor, was the law! Not very long thereafter, in 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his Oration, �I have a dream.� There was a flurry of civil rights activities - the peaceful rallies led by Dr. King, but physically violent protests as well, in answer to state violence. Young men and women like Ralf Brown, Miss Angela Davis, and to some extent, Stockley Carmichael, among them. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, and it was all about civil rights in the United States of America. Lots of less prominent Americans of mixed-race, or non-white race, were brutalised, arrested, and oftentimes they died in prison of injuries incurred at the hands of the law-enforcing agencies. Another example is the Rodney King episode in Los Angeles, almost twenty years ago; �BEATING� at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department for a banal �traffic offence.� Forty years after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr., one man, half as white as Abraham Lincoln, but also half as black as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would get elected as President of the United States of America. Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Arab-Americans, all voted for him. So he won the presidential elections of 2008 as the whole world watched on, many in utter disbelief! That would not be enough. Ten months after his inauguration, he would be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for peace! His detractors think (and even say it loud), that he doesn�t deserve it. Among members of the committee that sits in Norway to elect anyone, are the world�s best citizens, and saying so, one means thinkers, clergymen, educators, politicians, and what have you. It is rumoured the ace Archbishop Desmond Tutu, himself a Laureate, was on this year�s panel. If a man gets awarded with such a prize after ascending a position only ten months, it stands to reason, his present performance, rather than his past, must have served as a better yardstick. What of his performances so impresses the world to warrant the world�s most prestigious order of utmost honour?� Many people who may have heard about his book, before his turning into a Junior Senator, �The Dreams of my Father�, or read it, (and the Author has), are impressed about his style of writing. The prize is however, not about literature. He is also not the youngest human being to have received the prize, which Alfred Bernard Nobel (1833-96), in his private capacity as a Chemist and Engineer, inaugurated at the end of his life, devoting his fortune to the benefit of mankind in all sorts of ways. President Obama�s benevolent souls believe the award has nothing to do with what the president has achieved through his writing of books, both long before he declared his presidential ambitions, and since then. It must have something to do with his vision for a world order, which redefines the role of the ATLAS, or senior prefect of the world in the first century of the 3rd Millennium AD, which the USA presently possesses, but may soon have to pass it on to�? Even though his vision for peace in the Arab/Israeli terrain may seem such an enigma, no matter how smart one may claim to be to try to understand it. His Middle East vision of engaging the Arab-world in a slightly cozier manner than ever before, seems to have more realistic solutions ahead, which the rest of the world seem to want to cling to. You don�t have any more students (e.g. German students), demonstrating in the streets of Frankfurt ready to be flown to fight on the side of Israel, against Egyptian or Jordanian forces, like they would in 1967. Today, the neutral stand which holds that both Israel and Palestine deserve each a homeland, in which to live and thrive in dignity, seems to be what the man in the White House seems to want to say, and it seems to stick like glue globally. The Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama in 2009 is unique from that angle. For the first time, and in 1919, after the carnage listed in history as (World War I) had come to an end, the then US President, Woodrow (Thomas ) Wilson, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his gigantic stabilising World Peace efforts (Versailles pact). Americans were among those exercising their freedom of speech, and their free-will to think, galore in their constitution, who expressed their disapproval of �The Obama Nobel Peace Prize award� in the first place. It is important to remember that in America, African-Americans are not in the majority. Obama�s win in the last American Presidential election had nothing to do with RACE! It had everything to do with political conceptualization. It had to do with courage to send a trend in a new direction. Pragmatism had been observed to have become too costly for America first, and then for the world at large. The sacrifice of human life and other resources had become too much, even for a land as resourceful as the USA. Were it for race, Obama�s opponent in the primaries, a former First Lady would have won. And on the national ticket, the Vietnam Veteran, John Macayne, should have taken it as well, hands down. It has been a difficult time for President Obama, right from day one of his presidency. The credit crunch, not of his doing, but an inheritance which had tagged on it, �make or break�, faced him seamlessly after the party at his inauguration was over. Afghanistan is not stable, and Iraq not either. Too many people are alive today (Americans and non-Americans), who remember such carnages as Korea, Vietnam, (Afghanistan 1, where the Soviet Union was the outside power, but lost), Lebanon, with high losses of American life, Iraq 1, involving the United nations (UN) flying on American wings, Iraq II, spoken of as George Bush Jnr.�s war). Then, the new Afghanistan, where the trend is obviously not encouraging. The new US president did pledge in his campaign-parole, he would send more troops into Afghanistan. He would like to see a quick end to the Afghan-conflict. The reason is more to help stamp out world terror and Fundamentalism, not necessarily tagging it ISLAMISM. For sure, the strategists won�t have it easy, planning and fighting �a war of peace� for a President, who has just been tagged with the most prestigious order for peace. Let us all be reminded, his electioneering slogan was, �CHANGE, WE MUST!�