But the process demands patience, trust, full support.
(EUGENE, Ore.) - Our 21st Century world was never constructed in any single day, despite faith-based myth, magnificent stories, and centuries of systematic religious teachings.
Since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, millions around the world have come to depend on the difficult, demanding, dangerous application of rationality --with reasonable action so-shaped/and/driven-- for any advances whatsoever shared by all nations now.
Those who expect rapid remediation of longtime concentrated conflict and competition, built from all-too human characteristics, can only simmer in their own concentrated-competitive juices.
They will surely be sorely frustrated by “their own sudden-syndrome magical/mythical expectations”, in this naturally extended-process always demanded for real progress --as centuries of experience clearly teach.
Real world-wide change, by its very nature involving many millions in many radically-different societies, inexorably demands time and requires patience on the part of all-involved.
Today’s Nobel Prize to President Obama --for his early and continuing, deeply determined, world-wide efforts to effect and assure the peace of our 21st Century by rational, reasonable remediations-- makes that point relentlessly. The last occasion was the Nobel award to President Wilson, circa 1920’s.
Multiple critics will immediately spring from their shadowy settings to declaim and denigrate Obama’s win. They suffer from serious paranoiac symptomologies including every form of psychological denial.
Many now make a multiple-dollar heavy/harvesting career out of ostensible calamitization of every possible potential forward-progress by this, our first President from the African-American segment of our nation.
Indeed, it has become highly evident that “the other political party” has dedicated its extremely determined destructive powers to every part and potential of the Obama Administration.
They see serious --perhaps even close to seditious-- unsubtle, uncooperative, definitely uncompromising and always negativizing attack/action as their only possible permissible plan for potential return-to-power. That’s clearly --and very obviously for this event-- deeply and desperately cynical.
Such action is politically, professionally, personally only self-serving, especially when perpetrated at the obvious damage to continuing commonweal responsibility.
That continuing kind of action is absolutely sure to preserve, promote and provide still further destructive, dangerous and denial-driven damages to our 250- year/tried and trusted form of democratically-shaped governance --already painfully extended and stressed by inexorably ongoing world-progress events.
But “their” continued active opposition and determined search for every possible way to categorize, drive into chaos, and completely distort/pervert every possible Obama action is sure proof of their true --and openly demonstrated-- objectives.
What we see at work surely reveals motivations which should bring “them” into brightly-illuminated deep shame, among the many millions more of most Americans already disgusted and deeply offended by such tactics imposed, clearly defying and denying what our Founding Fathers so carefully contrived to guide us over the ages.
Their continuing actions demonstrate the long proven unrealistic demand, vital to any so/called “conservative” philosophy, that “only the conservative view can be allowed to prevail”: With all power concentrated in THEIR “chosen elite” --thus destroying the very essence and heart of true democracy, setting at naught essential American values, expectations and political beliefs.
That’s the essence of the Lincoln-intoned “...OF the people, FOR the people, BY the people...”, muscularly made modern and still-potent by our continued open access to “the VOTE” --still controlling/all when we do finally determine our CHOICE -- and despite any failure and frustration delivered later.
We CAN, DO, and WILL CONTINUE to choose, to vote, and THEN to communicate, demand and determine what can happen next, as we continue to CHOOSE and VOTE. Only thus is essential change ever achieved within the characteristics of real democracy.
It will take deadly-determined fascistic power, potently applied over not only political but wildly physical and violent opposition, to wipe away and finally negate that basic, essential activating principle of any democracy: The potent power of the people, expressed via informned and intelligently-guided majority action.
How narrowly we have recently escaped from that common fate of former democratically-based governance regimes is only NOW --after considerable very solid and deeply professional-historian and social-scientist study and its consequential considerations-- becoming widely and well-enough/known to shape, succor, protect and properly preserve what we must do to continue our American survival for the 21st Century.
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The still-emerging and ongoing policy protocols and process demanded are essential developmental tools yet being built and rapidly put into place by the Obama Administration: Replacing and remediating the potent policy-power tools of the desperately/failed last neocon regime has demanded far too much time, energy and cogitation from this incoming “new regime rigorously revealing and rebuilding what has been done to our democracy” since the early Reagan-era irrational and irresponsible attack on previous progressive successes.
That true progress is under way in many areas, from economic surcease to the turning tide now beginning to appear for healthcare reform, is widely apparent. Proof of that delicate, dolorous pudding is primarily to be found in the beginnings of benign influences now becoming apparent on most areas of major concern, with marginally-improving consequences clearly traceable to rapid actions taken by the incoming administration under President Obama’s leadership.
Despite determined distortion/perversion of many progressive indications by the continuing impacts of the mainstream media --clearly not as much concerned with any national progress-made as with catastrophe and consequences citable agains this administration-- the plain and simple fact is that patience and proper attention to further similar action is paying off already.
Many millions of us are in a position from which we can only hope for continuation of what has been without doubt well-begun. Patience, understandings obtained by full, accurate information, substantially aiding the unavoidable everycitizen responsibilities for democracy we all share, is surely a major tool --one right in line with the American Way at the heart of our long-vaunted “exceptionalism”.
The Nobel Prize awarded to President Obama today surely shows that the premier world organization whose mission is responsible evaluation of exceptional, essential abilities and their application sees effort and beginning accomplishments demanding their full attention --and their Award to our first African-American President whose life-story surely reflects precisely what our Founding Fathers intended, despite their bound-down difficulties reflecting their own less-progressive time.
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Reader’s Note: This is the first of a continuing series written as “Signals from Seaside”, as we settle into a new situation here and learn much more about an intriguing community sure to provide exceptional reflection on all major issues current. We intend to cause cogitation, thus continuing the deep responsibility of every citizen to be informed and involved with problems, issues, and possible solutions and/or actions demanded to protect, preserve and extend our American values and way-of-life. Your comments are solicited and warmly welcome so long as they demonstrate active cogitation and further share-and-learn approach, as clearly intended here.
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At 21, Henry Clay Ruark was Aroostook Editor for the Bango, Maine DAILY NEWS, covering upper 1/4 of the state. In the ‘40s, he was Staff Correspondent, then New England Wires Editor at United Press-Boston; later Editor for the Burlington, Vermont 3-daily group owned by Wm. Loeb, later notorious at Manchester, New Hampshire UNION LEADER for attacks on Democratic Presidential candidates.
Hank returned to Oregon to complete M. Ed degree at OSU, went on to Indiana University for Ed.D. (abd) and special other course-work; was selected as first Information Director for NAVA in Washington, D.C.; helped write sections of NDEA, first Act to supply math, science, foreign language consultants to state depts. of education; joined Oregon Dept. of Education as NDEA administrator/Learning Media Consultant for tenyears.
He joined Dr. Amo DeBernardis at PCC, helping establish, extend programs, facilities, Oregon/national public relations; moved to Chicago as Editor/Publisher of oldest educational-AV journal, reformed as AV GUIDE Magazine; then established and operated Learning Media Associates as general communications consultant group. Due to wife’s illness, he returned to Oregon in 1981, semi-retired, and has continued writing intermittently ever since, joining S-N in 2004. His Op Eds now total over 560 written since then.
Op Ed: Nobel Award Proves 'Rational, Reasonable'Salem-News.com