The picture is coming - Democratic Underground

grantcart

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Sat Oct-25-08 10:14 PM
Original message

The picture is coming

There are, of course, many different ways to divide homo sapiens. We can be divided by race, sex, nationality, religion and affection for Ben and Jerry Ice Cream.

It has occured to me that humanity is divided by this picture. There are those of us that lived before the earth was pictured from the moon. We knew that once they got on the moon that they would train the cameras back on us and we would see ourselves from another planet for the first time.

We knew it would be blue.

However knowing about the picture and seeing the picture was too different things. Once we saw it we changed how we understood the world and the world became a whole lot smaller and great deal more beautiful. People all across the world saw themselves differently.

That picture changed how we see outselves, our neighbors and even our enemies. It changed the world that it pictured.

There are those younger folks who grew up always having seen the picture. They didn't have to change because the changed world was what they grew up in. Some of us are BP and some AP (Before/After Picture). We could have reset our calendars. No picture has ever had as deeply a psychological impact on the human race as this one picture. The entire Apollo program was justified with one click of the camera.

Sometime in the next few weeks another picture will be taken. It will show a beautiful African American Family in the White House. It might be taken during a preliminary visit or after they have moved in.

Like the Apollo program we know that we are on course for that picture. There will be an iconic shot that will forever mark that the human universe has gone to a new place.

We will all change when we see that picture. For some it will mean that a deep and dangerous river has been crossed and that a lifetime of frustration and disappointment in history will be lifted. For many young folks it will mean that the life that lays before them will have more possibilities than ever expected. Everyone will be changed in their own unique way.

In 1978 I taught a 3 month course for company executives in rural Thailand. It was designed to try and recreate an international experience for them and everything was to be in English. We showed all kinds of videos. One time we showed the Wide World of Sports boxing match between the United States and Cuba. When the Americans won they played the national anthem and out in the middle of a rural isolated area these 20 Thais insisted on standing when they heard the American national anthem. They were standing not for what we are or what we do but for the promise that is America. It is the promise for hope and change that the whole world desires. I could tell a hundred stories from the talking with communist leaders of the Peoples Republic of Vietnam immediately after the war or working with Iranians in the middle of the hostage crises that there is a persistant and even strange attraction and devotion that the world holds for the improbable proposition that the United States will eventually do the right thing and lead the world out of the current mess.

In a few weeks THAT picture will cross the globe.

Just like that beautiful picture of that small insignificant cosmic marble this coming picture will effect billions of people that have never stepped foot in the United States. For some reason I think of ethnic Koreans in Japan who are now reaching into their third generation of disenfranchisement who will see that picture - can they not begin to think that somehow their future is not enslaved by the past?

Of course an entire continent that is our original motherland that gave birth to us all and then was passed by in modernity will be strongly effected. I imagine that there shock will be the strongest. It will raise hope and expectations. I should think that it will also create an appetite for accountability for change - and change now.

How many slum children in Cairo, New Dehli, Soweto, Dhaka, Djakarta will gaze on that picture and wonder about their own future.

Of all the countries where it could have the most significant unintended impact I would guess Burma. Ruled by a very small minority where the business, religious, educational and social structures have all rejected the Junta that oppresses them, a charismatic leader that has been under a decade old house arrest, I wonder if a simple picture of hope and change will inspire an entire country to stand up and say, "not now, not this time and never again".

Of course that is all speculation. All I know is that the picture is coming and it will change the world and how we look at our country for ever, it will change people in other places and how they see themselves and how they see us.