Archive for October 9th, 2009

Hope is Cheap

Sharon October 9th, 2009

Wow, that’s a backhanded compliment.  Here, President Obama, have the Nobel Peace Prize.  Everyone will know you didn’t earn it, or do anything to deserve it, but you seem like a nice man, and well, we really hated your predecessor.  So you get a special award just for not being him, kind of the Miss Congeniality for world leaders.  Either that or the Nobel Prize Committee was under the impression that our bombardment of the moon was actually subduing some enemy. 

Tough day for peace, y’know.  More troops and drones to Afghanistan, more money in a military budget that is by a whole lot the largest in the world, more rumblings with Iran….  But hey, the first black president is also the first black president to win the nobel peace prize, so things must be looking up.  I’m hoping they give him the the faux-nobel for economics next - if we give him enough awards, he’ll have to do better!  Or the Heisman trophy.

The only real explanation is this - the nobel prize nominees, made up of the world political elite, the most educated people in the world, and prior winners have no freaking idea what to do next.  They are all hoping that a resolutely-middle-of-the-road guy who got to be president in the US has a plan, and some hope for the future.  They hope if they give him a prize he hasn’t earned he’ll live up to it.  Just as a lot of us hoped that if we started with big expectations, he’d live up to them.

So far, not so much.  And that kind of hope is cheap.  But apparently, so is the definition of peace.

Sharon