Originally Posted: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2008
I am writing this post on Saturday, November 8, 2008. I have been watching a DVR recording of MSNBC’s coverage of election night. Being at least a little to the left of center, I have grow to enjoy their coverage of the campaign, and wanted to see what they said on election night. Tuesday evening I was holed up in a hotel room in Shelton, CT on a business trip. My wife and I talked several times that night as the result became increasingly inevitable. I also reminded my children to watch as much as Mom would allow because no matter who won, they would be witnessing history, and that didn’t happen everyday.
Keith Olberman, not everyone’s favorite personality, just paralleled Barack Obama’s moment of victory to the moment when Walter Cronkite tried to describe Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon as being a distinct point in time when our American culture changed instantaneously. I agree, and there are other parallels and one important difference, worth mentioning.
A major parallel is the power that television can have in communicating “now” to millions, no, billions, of people simultaneously. I remember being 8 years old and watching that black and white image descend the steps of the lunar module while uttering the words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and those words changing everything for everybody. Not only did the race for the Moon give the world the age of computers and ultimately the Internet, but it erased a border for us. We could go outside the limits of our planet and explore, not only with our satellites, but with our own hands and eyes. And I saw that event at the same exact time as many others did, worldwide. Just like Tuesday night.
The second parallel is the magnitude of the effort required to make both events possible. From President Kennedy’s pronouncement on September 12, 1962 that the United States would put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade to that instant on July 21, 1969, thousands of people contributed their knowledge and creativity to achieve the stated goal. Again, from Mr. Obama’s announcement of his candidacy until the closure of the polls in California and other states at 11 PM eastern time on Tuesday, millions of people contributed their knowledge and creativity to achieve the stated goal. Both events were initiated with a bold statement of vision, something all too often lacking in our recent global efforts and financial crisis. Vision crystallizes thought, it focuses the collective spirit, and it challenges the individual mind to find the path from today to the seemingly impossible. Vision is always the cornerstone of transformational change.
This brings me to the one key difference I see between the efforts that culminated in Tuesday’s events and the effort to put an American on the Moon. The videos we see of the Space Race of the 1960’s contain only the images of white Americans and white immigrants. This was no fault of NASA and the contractors who contributed to this effort, but a statement of where we were as a country at that time. The images from Tuesday evening’s celebrations showed the rainbow that now defines the United States as different from the rest of the world. How are we different?
First, we have finally fulfilled the proclamation that we are a melting pot for the World. What we have been is a soup in that melting pot, each component certainly a part of the whole, but each component largely separate from the other. Each noodle, carrot, celery, bean, cube of meat, and onion slice contributing some flavor to a great broth, but separable when convenient. We have all seen those occasions of separation: the images of the civil rights uprisings of the 1960’s, the images of the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King arrest, and the images after the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. Those and countless other events have divided our soup into two or more parts, each angry at the other for what they thought were good reasons. And each time it took months, years, and sometimes forever for the healing to take root. Barack Obama’s victory and the effort to achieve it have put the blades of a blender to our American soup, and should make it all the more difficult to draw those same tired lines. Every part of our soup worked to get him elected, and each part will have to help to fully enjoy the fruits of this historical event.
The events that culminated in Tuesday evening’s celebration also give much needed credence to a fundamental that each of us needs to keep alive in our lives: Diversity always wins! And I do not mean just racial diversity, but diversity defined by the largest scope of the word.
I was fortunate to begin my professional career with The Dow Chemical Company, and they taught, and I’m sure they still teach, that “diversity” encompassed differences along any axis that existed in the company, or the world: race, religion, education, upbringing, region or country of origin, philosophy, etc. Their desire is for their employees to use every element of each individual’s make up to benefit the company. They believe this is accomplished through teamwork of the utmost degree. Teamwork of the type where people put all of their diverse, unfiltered thoughts on the table in a divergent manner and subsequently work together to converge to the best possible answer in the time allowed. For this to work optimally there can be no individual ownership of the thoughts and ideas on the table or the solution, only group ownership. In that case, upon completion of the task there is reward aplenty for not only those involved in the process, but all those affected by the outcome. It is my sincere hope that our next administration employs this type of process to further our standing the world community. Such a use of diversity and teamwork would set us apart on the world stage, where some centuries old differences, think Northern Ireland, the former country of Yugoslavia and the Sudan, still plague some countries.
Finally, Bishop T. D. Jakes was part of MSNBC’s coverage on election night, and after the magical 11 PM moment he said, “I now know that I leave my son a better country than I was born into.” Agreed, but only if the diversity and teamwork that elected our 44th President is used constructively to help our country solve the problems that plague us.
Until Next Time,
Julius
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