Noble Peace

The uproar over the Nobel committee awarding the Peace Prize to Barak Obama reminds me how much the envy and jealousy of the less successful fuels rage against those who do better and how deeply ingrained is the idea of entitlement that underlies their unfulfilled expectations.

In this case, entitlement doesn’t mean a person deserves something by some characteristic of his or her birth, but that if someone puts in time he or she deserves the reward. You pay for four years of college, you deserve a diploma even if you’ve learned nothing. Your daughter takes dance classes every Saturday, she deserves a solo turn in the Nutcracker even if she has no sense of movement.

Men like Jeremiah Wright, Roland Burris and Michael Steele, who’ve worked for years for modest rewards, are angry when they see someone younger do better. They don’t understand that his mere refusal to use their rhetoric and other tools of aggrandizement is one reason he’s more accepted.

People who still think they or Bill Clinton deserves it first forget that the mere televised image of Obama meeting as an equal with heads of European states not comfortable with their African and Arab immigrants gives hope to young people in those countries that perhaps they too can succeed within established institutions despite their inherited outsider status.

Hope for peaceful change is the most important prerequisite for peace, not all the procedural actions that follow.

Despite the grumbling of the less successful, it is not luck or charisma that made Obama a symbol of possibility to the downtrodden. He worked to graduate from school, he worked to become a politician, and he worked to be elected president, and people know that he worked, that little was given to him except some opportunities to work.

If only it had been luck, some wouldn’t be so angry. But when men have worked as hard and not seen the same rewards, it’s difficult for them to see the differences lay elsewhere, not in following the rules they learned in childhood, but in the ability to adapt to changing situations.

And so, ever since Obama began winning delegates to the Democratic convention, we’ve watched the unedifying sight of men who haven’t done all they desire by the current rules, uncomfortable that the rules may have changed. Ideology has nothing to do with the sense of loss dramatized by John McCain, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Glenn Beck and others who make their living as conservative or progressive commentators.

The mere volume of criticism should remind us the change arrived on Inauguration Day and we will either succeed because we deal with it or fail. Our society does not have to endure simply
because we live in it; it is no more an entitlement than anything else, and depends on us all recognizing the good and bad in our current situation and adapting.

Regrets not accepted.