Yes, we elected an Afro-American...

..but in focusing on this superficial fact, we ignore an even more transcendant element.

In 1980, I had the opportunity to travel to Liberia (West AFrica) for over a month with my then wife, during the Christmas holidays, while in graduate school.

I found the trip nothing short of tranformational. I had been raised by parents of the Quaker persuasion, with very uncharacteristically liberal leanings for the times, who had friends across racial and cultural lines. During our school years, we enjoyed several exchange students from Africa and Denmark. To our family, race was a nonissue.

Even with this foundation, as a young white man, finding myself for the first time surrounded and vastly outnumbered by people with black faces, of a different culture, was stunning and utterly disorienting and bewildering - but ultimately, deeply enrichening. I came away from that experience convinced that every whitle person in America, especially those most racist, should have to experience such a milieu - being a minority - for an extended period. Only then is it possible to truly empathize and understand that our similarities far outnumber, and utterly trivialize, any superficial differences that we have historically magnified far out of rational proportion.

This is the powerful gift that Mr. Obama offers to us. Rather than simply being bi-racial (and in reality, there is absolutely no scientific basis for a characteristic called 'race;' there is no gene for it), more importantly, he is international. He has lived in a variety of cultures, with a variety of perspectives and histories. He has been raised multiculturally. Until now, American leadership has been too typically steeped in a white, European, Christian perspective that has consistently viewed and behaved in the world in an 'us vs them' manner that always amounts to a zero-sum game; if 'we' lose, 'they' win. The world is past the time when this perspective is productive. In fact, if we were to maintain this perspective, it would be to the certain detriment, and perhaps eventual doom, of the entire world.

The challenges that face us are identical to the challenges that face 'them.' Food. Water. Energy. Arable land. Global Warming. Habitat loss, Species loss, ... Earth, lost.

In bringing an international perspective, a multicultural perspective, to the presidency - to OUR presidency - Mr. Obama offers us our last best chance to truly tackle these problems in unison and cooperatively with the rest of the world, instead of unilaterlly, in spite of the rest of the world.