“You recognize you’re not going to arrive with — you’ll never arrive at that promised land, and whatever seeds you plant now may bear fruit many years later,” Obama says. Only time will tell just how he fulfills that vision.
We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America. “The truth is,” the President said in the Oval Office, “that we have steadily become a more diverse and tolerant country that embraces people’s differences and respects people who are not like us. That’s a profoundly good thing. That’s one of the strengths of America.”
At the end of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s great 1952 novel about racial injustice, the central character says, “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain … Our fate is to become one, and yet many — This is not prophecy, but description.” Just 12 years ago, Obama was so invisible that he attended the 2000 Democratic National Convention in L.A. and watched it on the Jumbotron in the Staples Center parking lot. Today he is universally visible — and known. But he would agree with Ellison’s observation that this change is indeed description and not prophecy. The new America is not so much the old e pluribus unum — out of many, one — but, as Ellison says, one and yet many. That is Obama’s America. For finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union, Barack Obama is TIME’s 2012 Person of the Year.
Read more: http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/the-choice/#ixzz2GXxWYTda
We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America. “The truth is,” the President said in the Oval Office, “that we have steadily become a more diverse and tolerant country that embraces people’s differences and respects people who are not like us. That’s a profoundly good thing. That’s one of the strengths of America.”
At the end of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s great 1952 novel about racial injustice, the central character says, “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain … Our fate is to become one, and yet many — This is not prophecy, but description.” Just 12 years ago, Obama was so invisible that he attended the 2000 Democratic National Convention in L.A. and watched it on the Jumbotron in the Staples Center parking lot. Today he is universally visible — and known. But he would agree with Ellison’s observation that this change is indeed description and not prophecy. The new America is not so much the old e pluribus unum — out of many, one — but, as Ellison says, one and yet many. That is Obama’s America. For finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union, Barack Obama is TIME’s 2012 Person of the Year.
Read more: http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/the-choice/#ixzz2GXxWYTda
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