Obama: Between Biology and Destiny

Between biology and destiny rest the dreams that are awakened by ambition. But the new president of the United States of America is much more than that. Son of an almighty, ethnocentric, immature and erratic nation, that prefers the spectacle over history, invented Greek to tell the story of life, Obama is the most refined product of American idealism. Nobody thought Barack Hussein, with his name, skin and family history, could have accomplished what he has; he is the departure and result that American society has found to give and offer a breath of fresh air despite the profound economic and ethical crisis that threatens and contaminates the rest of the world. It is not in as much as political goods, product of an electoral contest, as it is a collective life preserver in the face of an unfathomable cultural and ethnic polarity that is sometimes masked by the recurrent refrain of the supposed existence of an inclusive and multicultural society.

Observing the works of the great New York painter, Edward Hopper (1882-1967), American social reality is reflected in an archetypical manner. North American life is sketched as tension between nature and culture, permanence and opportunity, time and distance, likeness and what is foreign, not one’s neighbor but simply close by. But this intellectual approach would be incomplete if we failed to add the will held by the African-American minority to achieve what they have. Let us not forget that of the 300 million inhabitants registered in the 2006 census, 74.4% (224 million) are white and 12.1% (36million) are African-American, which begs to say that it was not only the black population that voted for the Democratic candidate.

These descendents of slaves have endured blood, sweat, tears, distress, talent, productivity, elegance and rhythm to occupy their position in a society that relegated them and threw them to the mercy of the Ku Klux Klan or the CIA or repression or physical and psychological desperation, creating a society of racially unaccepted individuals, that started some time ago to undo the thick netting of lack of understanding and prejudice. And why not say it, white society has also turned, in appearance, more porous and elastic. Hippies, for example, created with “peace and love” the illusion that today seeps through pores toward the light. Of their own, the governments of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton took steps toward opening, and if Lavoisier was right when he was, that nothing is lost but rather transformed, we also need to give credit to the decisions made by power and white society.

Aretha Franklin, “Queen of Soul,” born in no more and no less than Memphis, Tennessee, never imagined that she would sing at the inaugural celebration of the president of the United States of America and share with him, among other things, the color of her skin. With pride, dignity, and democratic vocation, the public, I am not sure we can say the nation, listened to her in multitudinous action by which George W. Bush said goodbye. Amen.

Obama is no longer black or white. He is the president of the most powerful and fragile nation on the planet and represents a hope to his own, and to those of the rest of the countries on earth, which is all of us. Let us pray that his office be one of peace, comprehension, and rescue of the deteriorated international image of his country, which has given so much to lunch on, on the left and to international terrorism. [We pray] that it is cultivated by the democratic principals that we, too, from Venezuela, tenaciously fight for now that they are so much lacking.