Today is a good day, I think, to talk about one of the heroes of our time. I believe that Barack Obama will one day be looked back on as one of America's greatest presidents. I can support that view with a great deal of hard evidence. 

In the first place, he is an African-American who became president of the United States. That already is an accomplishment. It wouldn't be a special feat if we lived in a just world, but we don't. In this real world, there is still a lot of suspicion and prejudice between people of different races, ethnic groups, religious groups, and so on. It is just hard for a black man to reach that high office. Whites are the majority in America and many of them hate him. 

This point deserves a bit of digression which will turn out to be relevant to my thesis. 

Xenophobia is built into our natures because it leads to wars and war for centuries was the means by which our species stayed vigorous. We are the only species that survives by culture, by knowledge being transmitted from generation to generation, in other words. Other species evolve genetically. The weak and defective die young, do not breed, and do not transmit their genes to future generations of their species. Nature red in tooth and claw is what keeps all other species strong. 

But we get our living out of the environment by subtle tricks of behavior that get us nutrition, warmth, protection from predators, and so on. These are learned tricks; most of the time, we learn them from our parents and the other mentors of our tribe as we are growing up. Only once in a long while do we devise a new trick of our own. We have been evolving in this cultural way for more than 4,000 years and perhaps as many as 50,000. It's a good way to evolve. It's nimble and resilient. We dominate this planet like no other species ever has. In fact, we had to become our own predators and that is why war became a way of life for our species. Stronger cultures swallowed up weaker ones and war kept the whole species strong.  

But our weapons have gotten too big. We now have the capacity to drive the few thousand of our species who might survive a full nuclear exchange to cave lifestyles in a single afternoon. There is even a good chance that by two years after that war, there would be no humans left on our planet. Therefore, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind" (from one of John Kennedy's speeches to the UN). 

There are people all over the world, including in America, who think the only way to world peace is by one culture completely dominating all others. Such a vision of the future could never work. We need competition between different ways of life. The competition, if it is kept inside the limits of the marketplaces of the world, keeps us growing, changing and evolving. It is also worth noting in passing that any living thing that is not evolving is dying. "Life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday" (Kahlil Gibran). We have to evolve or die. 

The dilemma that we are in now is that we have gotten used to war as our way of life and yet we cannot practice war anymore. It can be solved by a moral code which allows us to compete, to stay vigorous, and yet to refrain from full military conflict. This is difficult but not impossible. We are reasoning creatures. Staying on our old warlike course is, in the most basic terms, unreasonable. We really only need to get that truth in order to save ourselves. 

So we have to create a code of human behavior, a moral code, that we can, in large majority, accept and adhere to. There will be delinquents, but they can be handled by a moral code that is translated into a legal code that people really believe in because it has shown that it really works. The courts in the West do, mostly, mete out justice. Again, it is worth noting in passing that this basic need for a legal code that does get justice most of the time for most citizens who have to appeal to it is the key to making a society, perhaps a world society, that works. Judges, lawyers, and policemen being fair will be the key to our survival over the long haul.  

All of this preamble is only leading up to my saying again more emphatically that I really love the current US president, Barack Obama. 

He has searched from the beginning of his first term in office to find the rational solution to every pressing matter that has confronted his administration. He believes in a balance of courage and wisdom, freedom and love.  

Are there tyrants in the world? Of course. Can they be dethroned without a war? Well, if their own people abandon them, yes they can. Can we persuade their people to abandon them? George Bush and his advisers never considered that option. They chose to lie to the American people about the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussein was supposedly building in Iraq. America and Britain just had to invade in the face of this "existential threat to the West". Later evidence proved there were no wmd's, and the reports of their existence were all lies. People who could prove that Bush and Blair had knowingly lied to their own populations were even killed for knowing too much. (Dr. David Kelly in Britain)    

Contrast that scenario with Obama's handling of the Arab Spring. A whole slew of tyrant regimes were overthrown by the West's making information available to the peoples of the states living under those tyrants. Not one American life was lost in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. More than 8,000 American lives and a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) in funds were lost in Iraq. And for what? A new regime that is continuously unstable because its leaders are full of spite for other groups in their state that they see as enemies. Iraqi Sunnis (the minority) and Iraqi Shia killing each other as they have for centuries. Libya today is still far from being a stable state, but its internal problems and the problems it causes for the rest of the world pale into insignificance beside what ISIS and its allies are doing in the former Syria and Iraq, that madhouse created by Bush and his cronies. In the meantime, Libya is making progress. Democracy just takes time. 

This way will very likely work in Iran as well. A treaty which limits Iran's nuclear ambitions to peaceful programs and in return lifts the sanctions of the major nations of the world, of which America is only one, lets the Iranians save face while it also opens them up to the ideas, goods, and mores of the West. With the rates of information flow available to the young of Iran, I believe that the old guard, the ayatollahs and their supporters, are doomed to extinction. Young people in Iran mostly don't think that the US is the "great Satan" anymore. The hand held out by a treaty written in a spirit of friendship and respect is powerful confirmation of their belief that they can be citizens of the world, just like people in the West. They can even keep their religion if they want to. The laws of the Western countries guarantee them freedom of religion even if they move to Michigan, Bristol, or Toronto. And those laws, for the most part, work. 

In short, Obama's way can work. Reason and respect can work. They just take time. But Bush's way of war and humiliation does not. The hatreds just deepen and go on and on.

Add to this picture the fact that Obama got health care for all Americans. The plan is far from perfect, but now that it's in place, amendments can be made. The first hurdle has been successfully overcome. 

I could go on and on, about immigration, gun control, women's rights and many other matters, but I think my main point is clear. Barack Obama is trying the way of decency and sense, at home and abroad. Courage carefully balanced with judgement; freedom balanced with love. He is trying to do what John Lennon said: "give peace a chance". 

War may be good for some businesses, but it is terrible for most. They lose assets without a dime of compensation. War may be good for some military people. Career officers who can't move up in a peacetime force, but can in a wartime one. But war is terrible for most ordinary soldiers. They die horribly or come home maimed to a country that does not want to care for them now that their time of military usefulness has passed. Then they watch the schools that their children must be sent to deteriorate. And for centuries, the poorly educated kids that came out of those schools in every part of the world got sent off to another war. 

But in these times of the internet, at least one of Karl Marx's predictions is coming true. When people get informed, they realize that they don't have to put up with this madness. In our times, blind obedience is no longer necessary or even possible. People are becoming too well informed for the tyrants to manipulate anymore. Even the wealthy and powerful know that. 

All of this, I believe, Barack Obama knows. And he knows the upside too. Give people a chance and they will, usually, do the sensible thing, which, it turns out, is usually the right thing. 

God bless Barack Obama. I don't know for certain whether he is aware of all of the subtleties of cultural anthropology and history, but he is acting like a manager of world affairs who is. He even went so far as to say recently in Kenya that traditional cultural mores can't be used anymore as justification for the mistreatment of women and girls. This was a very daring statement, it seems to me, because it is addressed to people all over the world who hide behind their culture and the values it espouses even when those values are clearly wrong. 

It also is clear evidence that he does understand the nuances of anthropology and history. He is gently but firmly telling not just Kenyans but the whole world: "We have to change. Ourselves. Our ways of thinking. Americans. Russians. Indians. Chinese. Christians. Muslims. Jews. All. Even you and I." 

He's trying to give humanity a better future. He gets it. 

                                                 President Obama in Kenya (July 2015)