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American awoke to the startling news that U.S. President Barack Obama was informed early this morning, Friday, October 09, 2009, that he had received the Nobel Peace Prize. He follows in the footsteps of former U.S. President Peace Prize winners Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.
While there was much warm support for the award upon its announcement, predictably there was also strong criticism, shock, even mocking of the award by Arab antagonists. Skeptical others deemed its award to Obama most premature.
As of this writing, nothing has been heard from leaders of the Republican Party. But given that Republicans and their representative media blowhards, elected and otherwise, cheered Chicago’s loss of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games hosting “honor,” one can just imagine the Rumplestilson reactions that will echo across this nation. Some will trumpet their disdain, others will whisper it. Both will try to minimize it or find some scintilla of socialism lurking below the surface.
In announcing the award to President Obama, the Norwegian Nobel Committee praised him for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Yet, Afghanistan is boiling, Iraq is still sputtering blood, Iran and North Korea haven’t actually done anything tangible regarding the “nuclear question,” and Israel and Palestinian militants are not showing any signs of beating their swords into plow shears and their rhetoric into peace prose.
So, without being disrespectful, the question does reasonably arise: why so soon? One answer I would hazard to guess would be this: An investment in the future?
The award is a heavy crown to wear and pushes recipients to achievement pathways that might have otherwise been trod more desultory. In other words, receiving the award almost before the fact, may, as they say in sports motivational lingo, further incentivize Obama and his administration to work even harder, at home and abroad, to achieve the goals that many in the world community would warmly embrace.
The Peace Prize announcement that spread across the Internet and on TV and radio was shocking but welcome to those who wish Obama well because if Obama succeeds in his purposes and goals, so does the world.
While the award may encourage his enemies at home and abroad to make Obama’s life and achievements that much more difficult, it nonetheless resonates with most citizens of the world. No one is unimpressed with Nobel prizes, for peace, literature, science, medicine, or otherwise. The marvel of today’s communications technology, with its capability in, seconds, to literally inform the world of events of this nature, has enabled an instant reaction with untold unfurling ramifications, ramifications that are already set in motion, both front and center and off stage, in the wings of politics and ancestral tribal pride.
Whether ramifications, such as the immediate legislative and military decisions and actions with which Obama is struggling shows the effects of this award may be hard to immediately discern and will be debated by many. But, one thing is clear about communications technology’s effects on the business of the world: Future Shock has become an everyday affair and we will need to get used to it!
