Sunday, November 09, 2008

Merits of the Middle


I'm as pleased as millions of others around the globe about the anointment of Obama. All those weeks of watching the polls anxiously whilst hissing at the perceived distortions of the right wing media. As I've been telling my colleagues, British politics is too boring simply because everyone has moved to the centre, and so you can't really tell the Tories much apart from Labour. It's polarization that makes politics fun, and American politics surely offers that. In life in general, I firmly believe that all truth lies generally somewhere in the middle, but then the truth ain't always much fun!

However, moving back to the merits of the middle, the race aspect that seems to please most people in the Obama case is that a black man made it to the presidency. Terrific as that is, I am more chuffed about the fact that a bi-racial person became president. I once took an ecological modelling class with a famous professor called Bruce Hannon, who firmly believed that human salvation lay in inter-racial relationships. I remember him marvelling at the genetic mix of a girl in our class who was half-Chinese and half-Mexican. I too silently cheer everytime I see a pale arm entwined with a dark one, or an oriental head resting on a latin shoulder. Whether it is inter-racial or inter-religious or simply inter-national, surely there is no better symbol of crumbling walls!


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