After viewing on TV the opening ceremony of the China summer Olympics, I emailed a friend rhapsodizing that it was one of the most beautiful pageants I’d ever seen. My friend, who leads her own international business and enjoys a bit of first-hand familiarity in China, shot back in stark disagreement. She likened the extravaganza to America’s ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq. “…a media display of Olympian warfare,” she termed it. I caught her drift. China was certainly saying there’s a new big dog on the planet (or perhaps reminding the world of China’s unmatched contributions to civilization over thousands of years). And how could that message, so operatically packaged, not be toxic to those who view China through the lens of its contemporary behaviors that appear at odds with human dignity? The decimation of Tibet being but one.
My problem is I’m a reincarnation man. So what I experienced through the Olympic ceremony transcended political calculation. I felt the hope of every Chinese mother throughout history at the moment of her children’s birth. That emotion, compounded over millennia, was an essential, if perhaps invisible, thread in the fabric from which the Olympic spectacle was created. Which is why I wept.Three months later I felt something very similar watching Barack Obama speak to the nation on the night of his presidential election victory. His win was of course historic in so many ways because of his race. Jesse Jackson’s tear-streamed face told a story that I as a white person (in this incarnation) am surely incapable of understanding as Mr. Jackson does. Yet, to me, the place of race in Barack Obama’s election is a footnote, albeit a pretty big one, to a deeper significance. Barack Obama represents a quality of hope that resides in the soul of every human. Moreover, it is hope that most of us are generally unfamiliar with because we feel it so seldom. At this rather youthful point in human evolution, our species enjoys little of the balance of mind and heart needed to engage life with consistent kindness, compassion and understanding. Just about every choice we make is motivated by fear. Blame and unforgiveness, two of fear’s most common expressions, are as much a part of our lives as blinking. At the core of all our fear is the belief that there is an “us” and a “them.” (And “them” are always dangerous, a lot or a little.) Our heart, our true self, knows this is horseticky. But very few people put their heart in charge of their mind rather than their mind in charge of their heart. And so fear is perpetuated. Like Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama is that rare political figure whose being vibrates with the understanding that the notion of “us” and “them” is an illusion…and that, in reality, everything is “we.” This is the consciousness to which the hearts of people around the world have responded in a way their minds may not yet comprehend. It isn’t Mr. Obama’s positions on issues that elicits this enthusiasm. It’s his approach to life—his approach to all issues—one that, as organic to his being as his DNA, addresses problems from a perspective that is inclusive rather than separating. This “consciousness of we”—that the humanity of each of us is bound to the humanity of all of us, that harming another without harming ourselves is impossible—is the fertile ground from which hope emerges in the human heart.
It is of no small significance that perhaps the greatest example of “we” consciousness in recent memory is how the South African government of Nelson Mandela took steps to heal that nation in the aftermath of apartheid. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was assembled. Its mandate was to bear witness, to record and in some cases grant amnesty to criminals. Basically it was a process guided by the premise that healing required forgiveness and forgiveness required an opportunity for those affected by apartheid to publicly share their stories, their pain, their rage, their shame, their sorrow ... And so victims spoke directly to perpetrators. Perpetrators explained themselves to victims. Revenge gave ground to understanding, though how much continues to be determined. The point here is that, at least in part, the path of truth and reconciliation was chosen over judgment and recrimination because of one of the founding principles of the new republic of South Africa—an ancient African ethic named ubuntu.
The essence of ubuntu is interdependence: that I am what I am only because of who we all are. That when others are diminished, I am diminished. And that my life is improved only when what benefits me enriches the community around me.
It’s hard to imagine that the application of such a philosophy to the wounds of apartheid’s viciousness would have occurred without the presence of Nelson Mandela. He was the mirror that revealed what already existed in the hearts of his countrymen… and all people, really.
Barack Obama plays a similar role. The world’s optimism at his election is only incidentally about him. He, too, is simply a mirror, one that illuminates the quality of hope that resides in the soul of every human. And feeling that hope is the cause of the world’s biggest smile in a long time.
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