Breathtakingly audacious

• November 05, 2008

By Francis Moran

More words will be written today, perhaps, about yesterday’s presidential election in the United States than have ever been written about a single event in living memory, but I feel compelled to add my own few since rarely in my life have I seen something transpire that I frankly never expected to witness.

U.S. president-elect Barack Obama will enter the White House in January arguably the least experienced person that office has ever seen. He will take up power atop a nation that has been wounded, perhaps irreparably, by grave errors of judgment and downright malicious intent at almost every level. He has ridden a wave of expectation, entirely of his own deliberate manufacture, that no human could ever fulfill, and this may eventually be his undoing.

But this morning, as the world awoke to a tectonic shift in the geology of human endeavour that few thought possible, Obama must be recognized for achieving the unimaginable, for forging a campaign and a connection with millions of Americans that overturned our every expectation about race and its supposed immutable place in the politics of that amazing, capricious, expansive and divisive country.

I lived in southern Africa for many years as a child and never thought I would witness the emancipation of South Africa this side of a bloody and protracted uprising. My parents are Irish, and I went to school in Ireland for two years, and never thought I’d witness the laying down of arms and the embracing of democratic means in Northern Ireland by men wedded to the gun and the laws of violence. And I never, ever thought I’d see a black man in the Oval Office.

The audacity of the human spirit, a force that Obama harnessed to his own equally outrageous personal ambition and rode to the most powerful job in the world, is boundless. Whatever he manages to do with the power he now has, this one man has demonstrated that anything we dream, we can accomplish.