It
is often said that, “There is no such thing as constant as change itself”. I can
still fully picture the year 2008 like it was yesterday with all its hype when
billions of people around the world witnessed the election of President Barack
Obama as the forty-fourth and first African-American President of the United
States of America. History was once again made! That night I sat glued to my TV
screen watching CNN as they covered the race to the White House live and
reported on every aspect of the voting exercise up until the point when his
overwhelming victory was announced. His victory seemed to spell hope to everyone
who had lost hope and the dawn of a new era to everyone who had been defeated
by the adverse circumstances life sometimes throws at us. One could see people
like “The Queen of Talk”, Oprah
Winfrey and Rev. Jesse Jackson shed tears of joy in the emotional crowd that
gathered in Chicago as they watched their ray of hope mount the podium to
deliver his victory speech in some of these words;
“It’s
been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day,
in this election, at this defining moment,
change has come to America.”
-Excerpt Obama acceptance speech, 2008
Famous secular artists
like Kanye West, Jay-Z, amongst others and also Grammy Award-winning Gospel
singer Yolanda Adams released songs about Obama’s victory all pointing to the
birth of a new era for Black America.
It was clearly evident
that people were tired and needed a change. They didn’t care whether he was
black, white or even purple as long as he “promised” to deliver the goods and
his political agenda perfectly blended in with what their hearts longed and
cried out for. They saw the change they could believe in lying within the ranks
a man who seemed to have a sound mastery of the intricacies into the hidden
solutions to all America’s problems. The country was in profound debt, a
disheartened people fed up with broken promises on Main Street and the corporate
greed exhibited by some of the Gordon Gekko’s on Wall Street, an ailing
government battling to the mitigate the effect of failed policies and the
closing down of giant Investment Banking Corporations like Lehman Brothers with
others screaming out for bail out, unemployment was at an all-time high, soldiers
were being killed on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that were
costing millions of dollars with no definitive end. In fact a lot was going on
which had to be remedied. Obama seemed to be America’s and even the world’s man
of the hour and thus everyone wanted him on board so that they could finally
see “The change they could believe in.”
But again I ask myself,
how the most powerful Nation on earth got to such a position to begin with as
we know that something like this wouldn’t have happened instantly with the cast
of a spell or the wave of a magic wand as we read in the fairy tales but rather
as a culmination of a string of events tightly knit together. Let me put it to
you then that things had been disintegrating long before this great collapse
and the severity of these little cracks were never wholly perceived in the
light of the Global Economy. Some individuals were doing certain things they
shouldn’t have done or taking oversight of the things they should have taken
seriously. The Global financial meltdown and its cronies I would say then were
only the fruit (manifestation) of the seeds that had been planted long before
this whole thing went off beam.
To be continued...
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