The Fierce Urgency of Now

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama on Friday shocked some, and inspired the usual if still ugly and disappointing vituperation of the Rabid Right. It also surprised many, including the President, and so in the first blush some called it "ridiculous" and emphasized how early it was in his presidency. Many voices have since justified it, partly on the basis of the tradition of the Peace Prize (as Rachel Maddow so ably did in the clip embedded below) and on the change that President Obama brought in such a short time to the international dialogue and especially, America's role in the world. But I think everyone is still slightly missing the point.

Yes, it was a surprise--which the Nobel Committee obviously knew it would be. So why? Why did the Nobel Committee take this surprising step? Why did they choose to single out the American President after only nine months in office? Why did that recent survey suggest that America has become more admired internationally because of Barack Obama?

The answer that everyone is missing is urgency. The Nobel Committee didn't just hand out an award---it stood up and screamed, pay attention to this man! Many European leaders in politics, sciences, professions, etc. and many leaders around the world, all understand that the future survival of the planet hangs by a thin thread. That progress must be made quickly on controlling and ending nuclear weapons, negotiating agreements that are just to all sides in areas of the world where conflict could be imminent and would be catastrophic, and especially that the world's great nations must band together to lead a rapid response to the Climate Crisis before it is too late for the future of human civilization.

This award is the diplomatic, international community equivalent of standing on the table, jumping up and down and shouting: this is our last best hope! This is the fierce urgency of now!

They know what American leadership still can mean. They know what President Obama is up against in this country. Political leaders told him at the G20 in Pittsburgh that they couldn't understand the attacks on him as one kind of radical or another, when he would be comfortably centrist in any other western democracy. They don't understand that the wealthiest nation on earth is undermining its own economy while failing to meet its responsibilities, when it remains alone in not supporting universal health care. They are afraid of a nation with such a powerful military machine and yet so careless about violence that citizens wear guns to a political rally, and that children gun down other children in the streets, while apparent adults oppose the most rudimentary controls on deadly firearms. They saw the same gunslinger attitude rend the world for eight dangerous years.

The Prize is an official anguished cry on the Climate Crisis. They awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, and America still didn't get the point. In the UK, our closest cultural and political ally in Europe, conservatives compete with liberals and Labourites on devising and implementing the most effective and most urgent measures to address the Climate Crisis. Now China is beginning to move its massive state machinery to address it--and to corner the market on the renewable energy technology of the near future. Now India seems to see the light.

But they need and want America to be part of this, and they see President Obama as the key to American leadership and American cooperation, and the return to American responsibility in the world. They know these problems are urgent, most of them made far worse by American actions in the past eight years, and they are telling us how important it is that President Obama be successful.

They look at this country and our media-fueled self-renewing cyclones of distraction, our 24/7 locust plagues of pettiness, our twittering fits of trivial obsessions, our instant acting out and the dead slogans nailed to our identities and shouting matches, and they're crying out: we value this man, the world desperately needs him as your leader, we hear him, why can't you listen to what he's saying? Can't we please focus?

The Nobel Peace Prize was exactly as President Obama said: a call to action. And what we're missing is that it was a decorously desperate, very loud, very urgent call. Maybe we should listen.