Hope has come to America (and perhaps the world)

 

On 20 January 2009, history will be written as  Barack Hussein Obama II becomes the first African-American to be elected as the President of the United States. The inauguration of the 44th commander in chief truly demonstrates the audacity  and triumph of hope and  is testament of the American dream:  the  freedom that allows all its citizens to pursue their goals in life through hard work and free choice. What's more, that all of this happened 46 years after Martin Luther King daringly imagined a "table of brotherhood of white and black' in his infamous I Have a Dream speech shows without a doubt that in America (for now at least), anything is indeed possible.

At has time when the America's reputation and credibility has been severely tarnished in many of the global issues we are confronted with today, from wars to global warming to financial excess and turmoil which has led to the current global recession, the world is looking and (indeed hoping) for the new president to address and remedy all of these.  True, these are all monumental challenges, too much to bear of even the most charismatic of leaders. But if the new president engages in inclusiveness and cooperation with is friends (and foes), in multilateralism instead of unilateralism, in a 'we' instead of 'us and them' , then the hope for a better tomorrow that we all dream of will surely become reality.