Kurt Barstow - Mindfulness and the Inauguration as a World Event
A nice post from Kurt
on today's Inauguration and its world impact. He makes some nice
observations about the hopes so many of us have for this new
administration, and the realities that threats that face us all, both
externally and internally.
Mindfulness and the inauguration as a world event
Shephard-Fairey, Barack Obama
It is an awfully big moment. In a certain respect, race has the least
to do with it, since, although one is keenly aware of the historical
and cultural importance of having Barack Obama take the oath of office
as our first black president, race can also be seen as the most
superficial division between people. It was Martin Luther King's wish,
after all, that there would be a day when people were judged "not by
the color of their skin but by the content of their character." What
makes the moment even bigger than an important first in American
politics is not only that we will now have a president that, in the
current ethnocentric division of race in this country to whites on the
one hand and people of color on the other, we will have a president
that for the first time resembles the majority of the world more than
any other. That would not be so important in and of itself if we didn't
also sense this changing of the guard as a change from an
administration that has in many though not all respects been informed
by a kind of small-minded provincialism, arrogance in world affairs,
and greed.
