GRACE PERIOD

We feel wonder, pride and satisfaction at Obama’s victory. Politically, it’s the equivalent of the 60’s desire for change, but done in the traditional manner. Lots of campaigning and money, to get lots of votes -- winning the old fashioned way. We miss the throw-it-up-in-the-air qualities of the Woodstock Nation years, but hey, our guy won in a landslide.

Now that we are older and wiser, the most important characteristic of anyone running for any office is nuts and bolts organizing. Ideologies have a way of disappearing with the variable winds of reality, but basic task and goal-oriented leadership done right gets our vote.

Java Jag would like to take a minute here to crow about several things. Anyone reading these columns has received a small reward for your time.

First, on April 16, 2007 we went after McCain for his nonsense condemning criticism of the Iraq war. We nailed him and renamed his ‘Straight Talk Express’ the ‘Crooked Talk Local’. There have been scores of riffs on his campaign moniker since, but in both tone and wit we like ours best.

Then, the day after the Iowa primary, in the column dated January 7th, we showcased and highlighted Obama’s revolutionary win. We said it was a game changer. We were proved right. The Obama presidency is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

A few days after Sarah Palin’s nomination speech on September 8th, we excoriated her. Java Jag busted her nasty, intolerant message and compared her candidacy to the ugly insurgency of George Wallace. It took Congressman John Lewis a full month to come to the same realization and state the obvious. We called her hairdo Barbie style and likened her persona to a contestant on American Idol. Subsequently, there were hundreds of entries in the MSM making the same observation. We stated that her strategy and being would alienate many. The electoral map and countless Republican Party political autopsies proved us right again. But enough self-lauding. What’s next?

The first message from Obama comes from his style and natural grace.

It didn’t take but a few days for two disparate but oddly convergent events that should highlight what is unacceptable in Obama’s new world order.

The first was the forced resignation of Belgium’s far right party senator Michael Delacroix who was caught on video singing a Holocaust ditty about a young Jewish girl sent to die in Dachau. The second, another video, was the Israeli soldiers of the Golani Brigade humiliating a Palestinian by making him sing a degrading song. This has got to stop. The Obama Weltanschauung has no place for hate, be it personal or as a policy matter. As a member or a race that was lynched only three generations ago, racial or religious hatred must cast a deeply disturbing stone in his psychic pond.

The dignity with which Obama conducted his campaign, the grace with which he withstood the false, ugly and absurd attacks by his opponent tormentors, was almost Christlike in manner. He constantly refused to lower himself to their name calling level and thus elevated himself in the eyes of the electorate as a statesman. This is beyond Teflon, In Obama it doesn’t appear to be a coating, but a core quality.

There is no more time for, or room in the world for, the singing of Horst Weisel songs from Nazis or Jews. The temperature of rhetoric from the threatening twins Bush and Amedenijad must be lowered from boil to off. There can be no global healing without hate taking a back seat. When we elected a black man president this was the message America now sent to every citizen of the planet. Now it must move from received to implemented.

As the Belgium and Israeli events have shown, easy to do cell phone videos and the Internet can serve as global spotlights. A twenty-nine dollar item can highlight and expose where hate and intolerance dwell and who is behind them. Now with our new president serving as a model, let a grace period start. A period where grace can begin to heal the world’s wounds.