Canada in O-mode
Monday, November 10, 2008
It is thrilling to see how the election has captured the Canadian imagination. The papers are full of O-news every day. Here is a saying I hadn’t heard before, from The Globe & Mail:
Mike Victor, a 57-year-old African American commodities trader, said, “Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obaba ran so our children could fly.”
And the G & M man in Washington, John Ibbitson, who writes well about America, had this to say:
Americans delivered a message to themselves that the world overheard: The
last eight years were a waste. Our leaders drew the country into a war in Iraq
that should never have been fought; outraged the Constitution with detention
camps and torture, and brought the economy to the edge of the abyss. Our leaders
were wrong, we were wrong, the people decided. We need to start again….
…This is a dawn to savour for everyone who believes that the future of
America is the future of the free world. Its citizens have risen magnificently
to a magnificent occasion, demonstrating that the affliction of race resentments
can be surmounted. Once again we have learned the lesson we keep forgetting:
that entrenched assumptions can be uprooted. Peace can come to Ireland. The Cold
War can end. America’s racial wounds can start to heal.
In the best of worlds, it will take half a century to heal them completely. But the nation is now firmly headed in the right direction.
Americans have shown us yet again what a fascinating, frustrating, complicated people they are. They have chosen a young black man with little experience in high office to lead them in a time of danger and complexity.
People of good will everywhere will wish him well.
