A Few Degrees of a Moment - Obama

Yesterday (oct. 16), I saw Prime Minister Gordon Brown from the UK somberly talk about this economic crisis from the British perspective, and he made this statement, among others, that upset me a bit: "... it's America's fault."

I think America represents two extremes in the world as it advances. America in general - well, its people - have hitched their futures on some of the most brilliant innovations and ideas towards progress, including on the social front. But it also has embarked on some of the most corrosive. Yet, even the most foolish of actions can become fertile grounds on which to blossom, economics included. The election of Obama may kick off for America one of its most optimistic, success- and endeavor-filled waves of opportunity in history, gaining great wealth as we learn the technology of integrating the world community and look towards horizons, like we briefly did - in my interpretation of that experience - in the 60's. The Internet is just a small example of what can be, if it stays egalitarian.

Europe was planning on developing its own GPS this decade but the Bush administration has attempted to thwart that, mostly because even the GPS atomic clocks that helps a European motorist navigate the hair-pulling Dutch-Belgian highway system are controlled by the Pentagon. Rearrange how some clocks coordinate space and time in that virtual world, and Wall Street might have a serious hick-up, planes may be off by a few moments of a degree and collide, and perhaps some terrorists in a remote mountain desert might walk into some special forces waiting for them.

Switzerland's CERN just encountered a problem with its cyclotron particle accelerator's superconducting electromagnets. America, in the early 90's, was planning on building a cyclotron in Texas that was a few times more powerful in TeVs (magitude of volts) per beam, getting protons to collide at 99.99(something)% the speed of light. But politics got in the way. Those subatomic horizons are just as exciting to the human spirit - with incalculable returns on the investment - as sailing across the Atlantic to find a trade route to India or going to the moon on a shoestring. Look at all which was developed though pushing the envelope to reach for the moon, including, oddly, the end of segregation.

With Obama I feel that we will learn to all better coordinate and enable what is good in the world. Issues, disagreements and such might be seen as an incentive rather than something to battle.

When I took a problem solving course long ago in college, our teacher - who'd been hired by GE and NASA - taught us how the brainstorming phase can be one of the most critical steps, prior to the discrimination process of arriving at a solution. Here, all parties involved with an issue, from the worker on a factory floor to the CEO managing its multinational interests, are brought into the process at that brainstorming phase, and given free rein to offer any idea they had into the huge pool of ideas. No one had the right to denigrate anyone's ideas, no matter how absurd, for often, right behind the most absurd idea, sits the best solution.  But unless imagination is freed to spit out the bad idea, the solution would never have come out of the shadows.

Without the utter horrors and nonsense of Bush/Cheney and McCain/Palin, Obama may never have come along...

And as the video above suggests, with Obama we may finally learn to laugh with the White House, rather than at it.  It only just takes a few moments of a degree in shifting how we decide to vote.

PS: please excuse my scientifically poorly phrased moments of a degree.  But I am a poet with a license to ...